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THE NEW CRUSADE 



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THE NEW CRUSADE 



OCCASIONAL SERMONS AND 
ADDRESSES 



BY 



CHARLES EDWARD JEFFERSON 

PASTOR OF THE BROADWAY TABERNACLE 
NEW YORK 



NEW YORK 

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 



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Copyright, 1907, 
By THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

Published, September, 1907. 



THE YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN OF AMERICA 

WHOSE HEARTS AND HANDS IF TOUCHED BY 

CHRIST WILL MAKE OUR NATION 

STRONG AND TRUE 

THESE DISCOURSES ARE 

AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED 



CONTENTS 



i 

PAGE 

The New Crusade i 



II 
Religion as a Form of Power . ... 21 

III 
The Person of Christ 51 

IV 
Liberty, its Dangers and Duties 73 

V 
The Unrecognized God 99 

VI 
The Man of the Sea ....... 121 



VII 

The Man at Bethesda 143 

vii 



/ 



viii CONTENTS 



VIII 

PAGE 

The Puritan Vision of God 167 



IX 
Consecrated Personality 187 

X 

An Angel in the Sun 207 

XI 
Young People of the Church 229 

XII 
Christian Unity 247 

XIII 
International Peace 269 



THE NEW CRUSADE 



Delivered at the Anniversary of the Congregational Home 
Missionary Society, Des Moines, Iowa, October 17, 1904. 



THE NEW CRUSADE 

I wonder if the time has not come for the 
preaching of a new crusade. Does not this age 
demand a Peter the Hermit or a St. Bernard rather 
than a Gamaliel or a Thomas Aquinas ? I know 
there is something quixotic and disconcerting in 
the name " Crusade," for the mention of it carries 
the mind back to those mighty movements of the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries in which masses of 
men flung themselves upon the Holy Land in des- 
perate and futile effort to wrest from the grip of 
the Saracen the tomb of our Lord. And when one 
thinks of the madness and superstition, the cruel- 
ties and barbarities, the disillusionment and vast 
catastrophes of those immortal campaigns, he feels 
like offering up the prayer, " From all crusades of 
every sort may the good Lord deliver us!" 

But the madness and superstition, the cruelties 
and barbarities, were only accidents and excres- 
cences, creations of the Zeitgeist never to be re- 
produced in like combinations or similar forms. 
They did not constitute a part of the crusade idea. 
In every crusade there are only three permanent 

3 



4 THE NEW CRUSADE 

and distinguishing elements. First, a definite and 
clear-cut goal, rising lustrous and alluring before 
the eye of the mind, bewitching men in their wak- 
ing hours and disturbing them even in their slum- 
bers. Second, a passionate enthusiasm which 
burns up in its white flames all lesser ambitions 
and mean desires, and which counts no cost too 
great and no sacrifice too awful if only the desired 
goal can be attained. Third, a loyalty to one 
supreme commander so intense as to melt all the 
soldiers into a solid phalanx and send them with 
irresistible momentum against the foe. 

Those were the three fundamental features of 
the dazzling and unparalleled phenomena of eight 
centuries ago. There was a goal, the rescue of 
the Holy Land ; there was an enthusiasm which 
burned up the lethargy and indifference of nations 
and which, eating into men's vitals, scorched even 
reason itself; there was loyalty to Jesus as the 
supreme commander, every crusader being bap- 
tized into the name which is above every name, 
and marching under the banner of the cross. Why 
should there not be a twentieth-century crusade ? 

If you ask what shall be the goal, my reply is, 
the rescue of America. America, the Republic 
of the West, the mightiest experiment in free gov- 
ernment known to history, land of the Pilgrims' 
pride, land where our fathers died, Washington's 
land and Lincoln's land, our Holy Land, to res- 
cue it from the hands of the Saracen, that is the 



THE NEW CRUSADE 5 

ambition of the new crusade. The Saracen of 
the twelfth century has gone, the Saracen of the 
twentieth century is here. Who is he ? He is 
the rumseller and the whoremonger, the gambler 
and the scurvy politician ; he is the dishonest mer- 
chant and the mischief -making artisan ; he is the 
greedy and unscrupulous capitalist and the anar- 
chistic wage-earner ; he is the bribe-giver and the 
bribe-taker, the law-breaker and the law-hater, 
the home-destroyer and the foe and enemy of 
Christ ; he is the man who works iniquity and 
makes a lie. To break the power of his mailed 
fist, — that is the object of the new crusade. 

America is in danger: the man is blind who 
doubts it. America may yet be lost : he who 
denies it does not keep his eyes on the swirl and 
trend of things. He has never put his ear to the 
ground and heard the roar of the subterranean 
fires which seethe and hiss under the thin crust of 
our civilization. He has never stood at the center 
of our great cities where Vice has built her most 
splendid palaces, and Wickedness has thrown up 
his long lines of forts, and where the rulers of the 
darkness of this world have massed their cohorts 
behind ramparts well-nigh impregnable, and felt 
upon his cheek the breath of worlds infernal, and 
been awed and subdued by the glitter and scarlet, 
the majesty and power, the horns and the crowns 
of the beast against which the Lamb must wage 
war. As James Russell Lowell used to say, 



6 THE NEW CRUSADE 

" Democracy is only an experiment," and the ex- 
periment is not yet completed. 

Government of the people, by the people, and 
for the people has not yet demonstrated its power 
to solve the problems which it itself creates and to 
come off victorious over all its foes. The star- 
spangled banner may yet be torn to tatters by the 
fierce winds which blow from the deep caves of 
the human heart. To beat back the Saracen, to 
repair the desolations which he has made, to rescue 
America, the land dedicated to liberty and God, 
and best fitted by tradition and training and 
environment to be the organ through which the 
Eternal shall proclaim his will to all the sons of 
men, that is the luminous and glorious goal of the 
crusade of our new century. 

Where shall we get the fire ? Let us get it 
where God puts it, in the hearts of the young. 
The hottest fires which burn upon our earth are 
kindled in the veins of the youth, because there 
are objects in the world-plan of God which can 
be secured only by the energy of fire. Young 
men for action, old men for counsel, so it has been 
from the beginning and so it will be to the end. 
To set the youth of America, boys and girls, 
young men and maidens, marching against the 
Saracen, that is the supreme and crowning work 
of the American pulpit. 

How can the work be done ? By striking the 
militant note. A distinguished scholar and pro- 



THE NEW CRUSADE 7 

fessor of Harvard University has recently declared 
that what our modern world most needs is a moral 
equivalent to war, something that will appeal to 
men as universally as war does, and which in- 
stead of destroying their souls will save them. 
Open your New Testament, O Professor, and you 
will find the moral equivalent of war expounded 
and illustrated. The Christian life is warfare. 
Following Christ keeps men on the battlefield. It 
is endlessly significant that the New Testament 
loves the imagery of war. Have you noticed that 
the men whose feet were shod with the prepara- 
tion of the gospel of peace went to the barracks 
and camp for some of their most graphic and 
effective metaphors ? It was not because Paul 
happened to be chained for a season to a soldier 
of the Praetorian guard that he loved the language 
of soldiers, but because military phraseology 
finely fits the forms of great spiritual truths and 
expresses with adequacy and picturesqueness the 
processes of victorious life. 

The characteristic virtues of a soldier are the 
crowning virtues of a Christian. Listen to Paul 
calling to' the Roman Church : " Let us put on the 
armor of light." He does not ask the old city 
who has pushed her conquests to every horizon to 
lay down her armor, but simply to change it. He 
does not beseech her to cease to be conqueror, but 
only to change the weapons of her warfare. What 
he says to the Romans he says to all. In the first 



8 THE NEW CRUSADE 

of all his letters he writes to the Thessalonians : 
" Let us be sober, putting on the breastplate of 
faith and love ; and for a helmet the hope of sal- 
vation." The figure was so pat and so illuminat- 
ing that he kept it and used it again and again in 
his sermons and in his letters, expanding it and 
developing it until it reached its complete form 
in the great chapter of his letter to the Ephesians 
beginning: "Put on the whole armor of God." 
When he talks to Timothy he speaks after the 
manner of a warrior. " Timothy, fight the good 
fight of faith." " Endure hardness as a good sol- 
dier of Jesus Christ." " No soldier on service 
entangleth himself with the affairs of this life ; 
that he may please him who enrolleth him as a 
soldier." And at last when the old hero was 
pushed to the wall, and the Roman executioner 
stood ready to do his work, he exclaimed as though 
it were the proudest thing a Christian can say : 
" I have fought the good fight." He was not 
ashamed of the gospel. 

In Ephesus and Corinth, in Antioch and Rome, 
at the center of a world which reverberated with 
the tread of armed men he held up his head and 
was not ashamed, knowing that he was a conqueror 
and was in possession of a weapon which was 
mighty through God to the pulling down of 
strongholds. The military manner of his speech 
flashes in the Greek where our English translation 
conceals it. To his beloved Philippians he writes : 



THE NEW CRUSADE g 

"The peace of God which passeth all understand- 
ing shall garrison your hearts and minds through 
Christ Jesus." 

Where did he get this conception of Christian 
life as warfare ? From Jesus of Nazareth. The 
Prince of Peace did not shrink from the imagery 
of war. As soon as a man was found who saw in 
him the eternal Son, Christ said : " Upon this rock 
I will build my church, and the gates of Hades 
shall not prevail against it." The idea of conflict 
was in his mind, and though the conflict would 
be terrific, victory at last was sure. When men 
thronged him, desiring the privilege of being num- 
bered among his followers, this is what he said to 
them : " What king going to make war against 
another king, sitteth not down first and consult- 
eth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet 
him that cometh against him with twenty thou- 
sand ? " 

A man at the beginning of his Christian life 
becomes a soldier, and the virtues which will 
make him successful in the Christian life are 
those which are indispensable to a successful mili- 
tary commander. To his apostles on the great 
day of their going forth he said : " Think not that 
I am come to send peace on earth : I came not to 
send peace, but a sword." And then in order 
that he might not be misunderstood he hastened 
on to explain that he meant that he had come to 
draw the line plain and straight, to array good 



10 THE NEW CRUSADE 

men against bad men and stir up bad men against 
good men so that a man's worst enemy might be 
living with him under the same roof. He held 
back nothing, but told the apostles clearly what 
they might expect. " Behold, I send you forth as 
sheep in the midst of wolves." We do not under- 
stand the word wolf. It does not belong to 
our vocabulary. What do we know of wolves ? 
We have never heard the howl of one at midnight 
nor seen the blood dripping from his jaws. But 
every man to whom he spoke knew the meaning 
of the word. The wolf was the most voracious, 
cruel, pitiless of all the animals of Palestine. 
Jesus said "wolves," knowing precisely what it 
meant. Translated, his declaration ran : " The 
world will be hostile to you. Men will resist you, 
snap at you, put their teeth into you, tear you, if 
possible kill you and devour you, but do not be 
afraid to die on the field." 

He dipped his brush in " hues of midnight and 
eclipse " and painted a picture dark enough to 
curdle the blood. Why ? Because he knew what 
is in man. He knew that down in the human 
soul is that which goes promptly out to face 
danger, suffering, death. The heart is by birth 
heroic and responds to the sound of trumpets. 
Place before the unspoiled man two roads, one 
strewn with roses and running out across fragrant 
meadows to lands abounding in comfort, ease, and 
pleasure, the other road steep and flinty, running 



THE NEW CRUSADE n 

up over naked crags toward a cross surmounting 
the place of a skull, and that which is deepest and 
strongest in him will choose the road which leads 
to the cross. If that is not true, then there is no 
hope of the world's redemption. 

This, then, is the New Testament way of appeal- 
ing to young men. We have not often enough 
made use of it. We have talked too much of 
happiness and made the Christian life a tame and 
prosaic and easy thing. We have not girdled it 
with perils or filled it with adventure, or made it 
so grand and stirring as to appeal to the heroic in 
man. There is in the wide heart of youth a whole 
world of appetite and instinct and passion upon 
which the church must lay her hand and make 
use of on God's battlefields, instincts which crave 
excitement and adventure, forces which are 
mighty in the pulling down of strongholds and 
the trampling of foes. Sometimes there has been 
too much introspection, too much emphasis upon 
the feelings, as though the supreme question in 
human life is, How do you feel ? What can you 
tell from the feelings of youth ? They are multi- 
tudinous as the sands and as changing as the 
waves. O the ecstasies and raptures, the elations 
and depressions, the agonies and despairs of youth ! 
To attempt to find God's smile or frown in the 
feelings or to determine one's destiny from the ebb 
and flow of the emotional life, that way madness 
lies, and weakness, and possible moral disintegra- 



12 THE NEW CRUSADE 

tion. We have had too much of the introspective, 
and not enough of the bugle and the marshal- 
ling of cohorts and the onward dash against the 
Saracen. 

Sometimes we have dwelt too much on defini- 
tions. No man cares anything for definitions un- 
til after forty. In the last half of life it is interest- 
ing to define the things that we have experienced 
and learned in the first half. But nothing great 
can be satisfactorily defined. All great things 
sweep beyond the narrow boundaries of our de- 
fining processes. Who can define life, love, God ? 
No one has ever yet succeeded in defining faith. 
The writer of the letter to the Hebrews tried it, 
but after he had gotten down his definition, he 
said: "Now let me illustrate what I mean." He 
knew that he had not succeeded, and so he goes 
on to tell of Abraham and how he turned his back 
upon his native land, and snapped all the tender 
ties which bound him to his home, and went out 
into the world which was wide and wild, not know- 
ing where he was going, but certain only that he 
was doing the will of God. He tells of Moses 
leaving the pomp and glory of the Egyptian court 
and suffering affliction with the people of God, 
never flinching and never surrendering, but endur- 
ing as seeing Him who is invisible. The examples 
come trooping through his mind, and suddenly he 
pauses, saying, Let me put the whole case in a 
nutshell : Faith is that spirit which " subdues king- 



THE NEW CRUSADE 13 

doms, works righteousness, obtains promises, stops 
the mouths of lions, quenches the violence of fire, 
escapes the edge of the sword, out of weakness 
is made strong, waxes valiant in fight, and turns 
to flight the armies of the aliens." Any man who 
subdues kingdoms, works righteousness, and puts 
to flight the armies of the aliens, no matter what 
his definitions are, is entitled to a place among the 
heroes of faith. 

At other times there has been too much so-called 
testimony, testimony which has come to nothing, 
too much reading of reports of things contemplated 
rather than of things achieved, too much recon- 
noitering as scouts and spies, too much speculation 
as to the stature of the giants, and too much tast- 
ing of the varieties of grapes. In a large part of 
all our praying and preaching, the soothing and 
consolatory note has driven out the martial music, 
and there has been calm-eyed reflection instead of 
the vision and exultation of soldiers eager for 
battle. 

Why is it that war is endlessly fascinating ? 
Why do the nerves tingle and thrill at the sound 
of fife and drum ? Why do boys love best the 
" fightingest " parts of the Scriptures, and why do 
young men devour with relish the latest book on 
the last military campaign ? Why do men and 
women who know what war is and who confess 
that it is savagery, barbarism, and hell, feel their 
souls expanding when they see the battle-flags 



14 THE NEW CRUSADE 

wave and the battered veterans march ? Why do 
aged men with their trembling hand on the latch 
of the door of the home eternal and their hearts 
hungry for the vision of the King in his beauty, 
become young again and mount up with wings as 
eagles, under the flash of the bayonets and the 
thunder of the guns ? One explanation is, that man 
is naturally a savage, that he is by nature cruel and 
bloodthirsty, and that his boasted Christian civili- 
zation is only the thinnest varnish concealing the 
barbaric soul within. 

Others would say that man is silly and super- 
ficial, a sort of human peacock endowed with the 
gift of strutting, and that he loves war for its pomp 
and circumstance, because they appeal to his vanity 
and love of display. Gold braid and spangles tickle 
him, he is captivated by the flash of gilt buttons 
and the glitter of burnished steel. But the deepest 
explanation is, I think, the truest. Man is fasci- 
nated by war because he is the son of God, and 
has in him immeasurable capacity for heroism. 
War gives him opportunity to face danger and 
overcome death. To scorn suffering and endure 
hardship and trample under his feet the utmost 
the enemy can do, this is all possible in battle, and 
for such forthputting of the soul's energies war 
furnishes the invitation and arena. Courage is 
beautiful even when seen against a background of 
blood. Endurance is sublime even when clad in 
hell-fire. 



THE NEW CRUSADE 15 

u ' Forward the light brigade ! ' 
No man was there dismayed — 
Not though each soldier knew 

Some one had blundered. 
Theirs not to make reply, 
Theirs not to reason why, 
Theirs but to do and die ! 
Into the valley of death 
Rode the six hundred. 

" Cannon to right of them, 
Cannon to left of them, 
Cannon in front of them, 

Volleyed and thundered. 
Stormed at with shot and shell, 
Boldly they rode and well ; 
Into the jaws of death, 
Into the mouth of hell, 

Rode the six hundred. 

"When can their glory fade? 
Oh, the wild charge they made ! 

All the world wondered. 
Honor the charge they made ! 
Honor the light brigade, 

Noble six hundred! " 

And to the end of time the world will echo the 
poet's words, " Noble six hundred." 

" The Son of God goes forth to war 
A kingly crown to gain ; 
His blood-red banner streams afar : 
Who follows in his train ? " 

The work is stupendous, and we err when we make 
it small. We have a fashion of cutting it into strips, 



16 THE NEW CRUSADE 

scissoring it into ribbons, and losing the uplift which 
comes from the vision of proportions majestic. We 
cut the world in two and speak of Foreign Missions 
and Home Missions. We cut up Home Missions 
into little bits and lose out of it the inspiration 
which belongs to an enterprise colossal. To many, 
Home Missions suggest a lumber camp, a mining 
camp, a rude and rugged hamlet in the wilderness, a 
straggling settlement on some far-off frontier. The 
fact is, we are all on the frontier, and wherever we 
may live the problems of the lumber camp and the 
mining camp and the pioneer settlement are at our 
door. We are always in sight of the Saracen. It 
will be a long campaign. We blunder when we 
prophesy that it will be brief. No sixty or one- 
hundred day men are wanted. Every man must 
enlist for life and in every heart the spirit must 
burn. 

" I will not cease from mental fight, 

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, 
Till we have built Jerusalem 

In America's green and pleasant land." 

It will be a costly campaign, it will demand mill- 
ions and hundreds of millions of dollars. All the 
money contributed up to date is only a trifle com- 
pared with the money needed for so gigantic a 
task. Indeed, we may say we have thus far gotten 
no money at all : we are hoping to secure some by 
and by. What do we Americans care for money 



THE NEW CRUSADE \J 

when by it we can accomplish our wishes ? When 
did Americans ever draw back from an enterprise 
deemed deserving on account of the cost or the 
price ? They told New York City it would cost 
tens of millions to run a tunnel through the granite 
foundation of Manhattan Island, and the city cried, 
" Let the great work be done." They told the 
Empire State it would cost a hundred millions to 
cut a ship canal from Buffalo to Albany, and the 
people with a mighty voice shouted, " That is the 
kind of canal we want ! " They told the United 
States government that it would cost a fabulous pile 
of gold to join the Atlantic and the Pacific, and Con- 
gress, nothing daunted, ordered the work to be begun. 
Shame on us if from the rescue of the Republic we are 
drawn back by expenditures which seem gigantic. 

What is gold for, but to be used in extending the 
kingdom of our Lord ? It will cost money and it 
will cost men. But to what better purpose can 
the lives of men be spent than in breaking the 
power of the Saracen ? Nations when engaged in 
war do not falter because the war demands men. 
Japan sends a hundred thousand soldiers into 
Manchuria, and because they are not sufficient 
she sends another hundred thousand, and when they 
are found to be not enough she sends a hundred 
thousand more. What matters it how great the sac- 
rifice, and how many thousand men give up their lives, 
if only the Japanese empire can beat back its enemy 
and save itself from being blotted off the map of the 



1 8 THE NEW CRUSADE 

world ? And what matters it how many of us go 
down into premature graves if America can only 
be wrested from the grip of the Saracen ? 

The work is as difficult as it is costly. When 
Christ sent forth his apostles he commanded them 
to do four things, all of them impossible : " Heal 
the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, and 
cast out demons." So the great commission ran, 
and so it runs for us. We too must do the impos- 
sible, for with God all things are possible. We 
must heal the sick. They are lying by the tens of 
thousands in the bottoms of our great cities, and 
the groan of their sufferings comes to our ears. 
They lie within sight of the gleam of our fine 
linen and like Lazarus they are fed upon crumbs. 
At the last great day they will rise up against us 
with the awful accusation : " I was sick and in 
prison and ye visited me not." There is a leper 
out in Utah. That leper must be cleansed. 

There is a race which is dead, dead to the higher 
ideals and visions of the soul, and that dead negro 
race must be raised. Society is tormented with 
many demons : gambling, commercial greed, race 
hatred, political corruption, militarism, industrial 
tyranny, and drink, and all these demons must be 
exorcised by the twentieth-century crusader. The 
liquor traffic slays every year, under the protection 
of the stars and stripes, more men and women 
than are annually butchered by Abdul the Damned. 
To cast out these demons, this is our work, and in 



THE NEW CRUSADE 19 

the name and by the power of God we must do it. 
It will take as much courage as the men had who 
fought at Bunker Hill. The battle will be fiercer 
than that of Gettysburg. There will be wider 
scope for the lofty courage of an intrepid spirit 
than was furnished at Santiago or San Juan Hill. 
One day there passed into the temple at Jeru- 
salem a young man whose spirit was dejected. 
Uzziah the Magnificent was dead. The hand which 
had ruled with majesty and power was lifeless and 
cold. Fearful problems faced the kingdom, alarm- 
ing perils loomed on every hand, and the young 
man, Isaiah, sad of heart and perplexed in mind, 
sought refuge in the temple. And standing there 
he lifted up his eyes, and lo ! God appeared. Out 
of the ineffable glory there came a voice : " Who will 
go ? " and, humble and yet courageous, the youth 
replied : " Send me ! " There is much in Amer- 
ica just now which is depressing. Problems are 
multitudinous and complicated, and dangers hang 
ominous in every horizon. Uzziah the Magnificent 
is dead. Washington is dead, and all the immor- 
tal company of those who with him laid the deep 
foundations of the Republic. Lincoln is dead, and 
Garfield is dead, and McKinley is dead, Grant is 
dead, and Sheridan, and Sherman, and nearly all 
the immortal commanders who in the great war 
carried our flag to victory. The grand army of 
the Republic is dwindling with the years, and it 
will soon have vanished from the earth. 



20 THE NEW CRUSADE 

The teachers who taught us and the preachers 
who thrilled and lifted us in our boyhood have 
nearly all passed into the city whose gates are 
pearl. And instead of this great company of 
heroes and martyrs and saints, we see a flood of 
immigrants flowing through our eastern gateways 
in tidal waves across the land, men of foreign 
speech and alien look, of curious custom and 
strange belief, to whom Washington is a name and 
Lincoln altogether unknown : and these men are 
taking possession of the hills and valleys of New 
England and of the great farms of the West ; they 
are climbing to power in all our cities, sitting down 
with scant reverence to our traditions and customs 
in the seats of the mighty, and on this great tide 
of foreign life American institutions and ideals roll 
like ships on a sea tossed by storm ! What we 
need is a fresh vision of God. There is still 
ground for hope. In the temple of our American 
Christianity a young man is standing. He is look- 
ing into the light which is inaccessible. Out of the 
glory there comes to him a voice : " Who will go ? " 
And down deep at the center of the reply which 
shall fall from the young man's lips lies concealed 
the destiny of the Republic. 

" O beautiful my country, ours once more. 
What were our lives without thee? 
What all our lives to save thee ? 
We reck not what we give thee ! 
We will not dare to doubt thee ; 
But ask whatever else, and we will dare." 



II 

RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 



Delivered in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, March 
n, 1906. 



22 



II 

RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 

"The kingdom of God is not in word, but in power." 

— i Cor. iv. 20. 

This is a common saying of Paul. We might 
count it one of his maxims. He is always ex- 
pressing this thought, now in one form and now 
in another. He is determined to make it clear that 
Christianity is not a thing of words, but a thing of 
power. He seems at times to have a contempt for 
words. It is so easy to use them, so many people 
take delight in using them. 

The church in Corinth was filled with such peo- 
ple. They were adepts in the use of language. 
Paul writes to them and says : " Yes, a lot of you 
can beat me out in the use of words, I do not pre- 
tend to be a match for many of you, but I am 
willing to subject myself to this test : When I 
come we shall see who it is that has the power." 
That is the test by which he wished to be meas- 
ured. And that is the test which we insist upon 
to-day. No man is estimated by what he says, ' 
every man is ranked by what he does. 

Christianity, Paul says, is to be measured in the 
23 



24 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 

same way. If it were not a religion of power, if it 
did not accomplish things, if it did not work trans- 
formations in the lives of men, it would be good for 
nothing but to be trampled under the feet. To the 
Romans he says : " I am not ashamed of the gos- 
pel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto 
salvation to every one that believes." Paul knew 
that the word power would strike a responsive 
chord in the hearts of the Roman Christians. Men 
in the city on the Tiber could appreciate strength, 
effectiveness, might Paul is not ashamed to be a 
preacher of Christianity in a city in which power is 
the one thing deemed worth admiring, because the 
religion of Jesus is able to attack and overcome. 

Paul always considered himself a soldier; he was 
engaged in a mighty warfare. To the Corinthians 
he wrote : " The weapons of our warfare are not 
carnal, but they are mighty to the pulling down 
of strongholds.' ' He loved to think of the power 
of Christ. It was from Christ that the apostle 
drew all his strength. " I can do all things through 
him who strengtheneth me," was the exultant shout 
which came from his lips as he passed from city to 
city and from country to country. In his great 
letter to the Colossians, which is preeminently 
his letter on Christ, he pictures him as the head 
of all principality and power. In his letter to the 
Ephesians he tells his readers that he is constantly 
praying that they may know the exceeding great- 
ness of God's power to usward who believe, accord- 



RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 25 

ing to the working of his mighty power which he 
wrought in Christ. 

It is because he sees Christ far above all princi- 
pality and power and might and dominion that he 
passes through the storm of persecution with a 
song on his lips. It is the omnipotence of God 
which causes him again and again to burst into 
exclamations of praise in the midst of his argu- 
ment. "Unto him that is able to do exceeding 
abundantly above all that we ask or think accord- 
ing to the power that worketh in us, unto him be 
glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all 
ages, world without end. Amen." When he writes 
to Timothy it is to exhort him to remember that 
he has not received the spirit of fear, but the 
spirit of power and of love. He warns the young 
preacher to beware of all people who retain the 
form of godliness and deny the power thereof. 
Let us think this morning about religion moving 
in the realm of power. 

Religion always has a tendency to degenerate. 
This is because religion deals with things that are 
above, and men are of the earth earthy. There 
has never been a religion in the world which has 
not had its seasons of declension and deteriora- 
tion. There is a constant temptation to make re- 
ligion simply a form of words. Men are incurably 
religious, instinctively they hunger for God. They 
will not forsake him utterly even though they 
refuse to live his life. Instead of renouncing him 



26 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 

altogether, they will cling to the words which ex- ^ 
press his praise, they will go on repeating sen- 
tences suggestive of adoration and devotion even 
when their hearts are far from him. 

That has been the tendency of every religion in 
every time. And Christianity has again and again 
suffered this common catastrophe. From the age 
of Constantine onward the Christian religion under- 
went a steady declension, becoming increasingly 
formal and mechanical, losing out of it the ele- 
ments of spiritual power. In many parts of the 
Christian world the religion of Jesus degenerated 
into a form of words. Men and women still said 
their paternosters, but the spirit of the Lord had 
departed from their hearts. Priests at the altar 
kept repeating the old Latin words, Hoc est corpus, 
while their own hearts were sordid and worldly 
and the people to whom they ministered had little 
conception of the great truth which the words had 
once symbolized. In a thousand churches the 
priests kept on droning the old threadbare words, 
and to the ears of the ignorant and degraded wor- 
shippers the words were only unintelligible gibber- 
ish. It is from this Latin phrase, Hoc est corpus, 
that we have gotten our word Hocuspocus. 

To such depths Christianity descended in the 
ages which history calls dark. This tendency, 
illustrated on a large scale in human history, is a 
tendency against which every Christian man must 
constantly contend. To all of us the temptation 



RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 27 

comes to reduce Christianity to a form of words. 
We will not renounce it, we will not forsake it, we 
will not leave it, and we will keep on repeating the 
dear and sacred words. How easy it is to repeat 
the Lord's Prayer, saying the words while the 
heart does not pray. How readily we repeat the 
Apostles' Creed, holding tightly to the form of 
sound words while the mind is wandering to the 
ends of the earth. How common it is to sing : 
" All hail the power of Jesus' name ! " with no 
answering thrill in the heart to the thought. Or 
" Nearer, my God, to Thee," without making the 
slightest effort to have the prayer fulfilled. 

Christianity may also degenerate into a form of 
knowledge. It may be conceived as a philosophy, 
or poetry, or a science, a body of knowledge to be 
possessed, a group of doctrines to be accepted, a 
bundle of affirmations to be agreed to. From the 
very beginning there has been in wide circles a 
tendency to reduce Christianity to a matter of the 
intellect and to make subscription to a creed the 
test of one's spiritual condition in the eyes of God. 
The Christian religion is rich in the problems 
which it suggests to the intellect. The life of 
Jesus bristles with questions which the thoughtful 
mind takes delight in striving to answer. The 
death of Jesus is a phenomenon which has always 
provoked men to thought, and the whole body of 
Christian scriptures awakens intellectual activity 
and gives the mind delight by stimulating it to 



28 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 

attempt a formulation of the great ideas embedded 
in these scriptures. 

To dig out these ideas and relate them one to 
another and build them into a system, all this has 
endless fascination for certain types of mind, and 
in many a century the definition of a Christian 
has been a man who accepts the ideas which the 
New Testament presents. Gnosticism in the third 
century, and Hegelianism in our own time have 
conceived religion to be simply a form of knowl- 
edge, and many a man has imagined himself to be 
religious when he was simply interested in religious 
notions. 

These are the two tendencies, then, against which 
every professing follower of the Lord must be on 
his guard. The tendency to reduce Christianity 
to a form of words is the besetting temptation of 
Roman Catholicism. By its tremendous emphasis 
on ceremonies and by its constant repetition of 
paternosters, Romanism has always shown a ten- 
dency to degenerate into a ceremony, a ritual, a 
form of language, while the power of the Son of 
God to mold and lift men's lives has too fre- 
quently been lost sight of. When a Protestant 
attends a Roman Catholic church he is likely 
to come away hungry. There are so few ideas, 
there are so many apparently formal words. 

Against this tendency to formalism every devout 
Roman Catholic priest must make everlasting war- 
fare. In the Protestant church the tendency is to 



RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 29 

reduce Christianity to a form of knowledge. We 
Protestants boast ourselves upon our intellec- 
tuality, we take delight in playing with ideas. We 
are experts in the formulation of high doctrines, 
we philosophize and speculate and compare our 
notions one with the other, and suppose that by 
working with ideas we become really faithful fol- 
lowers of the Lord. The average Roman Catholic 
feels that he is not a good Catholic unless he 
attends the mass. The average Protestant feels 
that he is not a good Protestant unless he accepts 
the creed. " I go to mass every Sunday," says 
the Catholic in a tone of exultation, as though that 
were the supreme thing which Almighty God ex- 
pects of man. " I accept everything in the creed," 
says the Protestant in a tone of great complacency, 
as though the acceptation of a creed would make 
a man a Christian ! 

With these two tendencies always working in the 
heart we need to come back again and again to 
the New Testament and hear Paul saying : " The 
kingdom of God is not in word, but in power." 
According to the New Testament Christianity is 
a form of power, it is a religion that works mira- 
cles. It produces mighty transformations, and 
turns the world upside down. The history of 
early Christianity is a history of opening prisons, 
opening graves, and unprecedented happenings. 
Jesus showed a remarkable indifference to words. 
He never wrote a sentence, nor did he ask any- 



30 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 

body else to write. He expressly said that men 
might speak words which were derogatory to 
him, but that this would not be fatal unless they 
quenched the divine spirit in their heart. 

The men who wrote the New Testament were 
seemingly reckless in the loose way in which they 
handled the scriptures. When they quote the Old 
Testament scripture they are not at all careful to 
quote it accurately : they paraphrase it, they give 
the gist of the passage. They do not care for 
precise syllables or exact phrases. It is a fact the 
significance of which should not be overlooked, 
that Jesus before his ascension told his apostles 
they must stay in Jerusalem until they had received 
power from on high. They had already received 
his words, but with his words they were able to do 
nothing ; they had learned the Lord's Prayer and 
had memorized his parables, and had drunk in the 
great discourses spoken in the upper chamber, but 
even the words of God himself are of no avail in 
opening human hearts and changing the spiritual 
climate of this earth unless the words are used by 
men who have been baptized with power. 

The apostles had been instructed in the ideas of 
the Master, they knew all the truths which he had 
taught them on the street corners and in the fields, 
but even in possession of these ideas they were 
absolutely impotent, and were commanded to tarry 
in Jerusalem until they had received something 
better than ideas — the power of the Holy Spirit. 



RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 31 

Even the ideas of God himself are useless in the 
great work of overcoming evil unless the ideas 
are used by men who have received the heavenly 
baptism. That is the vital distinction which the 
New Testament never loses sight of, the distinc- 
tion between words and ideas on the one side and 
the power of God on the other. Words are de- 
preciated, philosophy or systematized ideas are also 
scorned and made light of. Christianity is noth- 
ing, according to the writers of the New Testa- 
ment, unless it moves in the realm of power. 

We are now ready to interpret, I think, certain 
phenomena of our own day. What is the matter 
with the Christian church ? men are everywhere 
asking. Has not the Christian church Christ's 
words ? Yes. Do not all Christian preachers 
possess Christ's ideas ? Yes. What then is the 
matter with the church ? The church in many 
a quarter lacks the one thing essential -^Jpower 
from on high. In many congregations religion 
has degenerated into a thing of words, in many 
other circles it is nothing but a matter of opinions. 
Only in those regions in which Jesus of Nazareth 
still does mighty deeds is the church really alive. 

On a certain occasion Jesus chided the leaders 
of his day because they did not know how to inter- 
pret the signs of the times. They were skilled 
in putting two things together in the lower realms 
of experience and thought. They could put a cer- 
tain color of the sky and a storm together, they 



32 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 

could put another color of the sky and fair weather 
together ; but when they saw the spiritual climate 
of Palestine changing, they could not put that 
change and God together. We are equally blind 
ofttimes in our efforts to interpret the signs of our 
times. 

How we blunder when it comes to accounting 
for the really great things which are taking place 
under our eyes. How many of you, for instance, 
are acquainted with the work of the Salvation 
Army ? You know that such an institution exists, 
you have heard the drum — and that is about all 
that some of you have heard. A few of you, it may 
be, have stopped at the street corner and heard a 
Salvation Army leader talk. The talk did not 
much edify you, and you passed on thinking that 
Salvation Army sermons are like the drum, sound 
chiefly, signifying nothing. Others of you have 
gone a little further. You have attended Salvation 
Army meetings, you know something of the work, 
but how few of us realize the extent of the work 
which the Army is really doing. It reads like a 
glowing page added to the Book of the Acts. In 
49 different countries the Army is working, in 31 
different languages it preaches the gospel. It holds 
a million and a half meetings every year. It has 
18 land colonies, with 30,000 acres of land under 
cultivation. It has 116 Rescue Homes, and 17 
Prison Gate Homes, and 180 Shelter Stations, and 
644 social institutions, and 7200 corps and outposts, 



RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 33 

with nearly 17,000 officers and cadets. In our own 
country the Army has 50,000 soldiers, and the 
converts which they make aggregate 6600 every 
month. They spend $900,000 a year on the poor, 
and are doing an amount of social and philanthropic 
work which cannot be here described. And all this 
growth in a single generation ! 

How will you account for it ? This is my expla- 
nation : The Salvation Army conceives of Chris- 
tianity as a form of power. That this is true, 
is indicated in its name, in the titles of its officers, 
in the whole vocabulary of its sermons and hymns. 
When you attend the Salvation Army meetings you 
are sure to hear something about the power of Jesus. 
He is the Almighty Saviour. He saves sinners from 
their sins. He saves to the uttermost all who put 
their trust in him. No man is too tightly bound by 
his habits to be delivered by this Mighty Conqueror. 
One of their favorite hymns is, " All hail the power 
of Jesus' name! " You never hear that hymn sung 
anywhere else as it is sung in the Salvation Army. 
They sing : " Jesus Saves ! Jesus Saves ! " There 
is a tone of triumph in the refrain which makes 
the heart beat. 

You cannot account for the Salvation Army suc- 
cesses by its words. It is poor in words. Many of 
its preachers are uneducated. The Army is poor in 
ideas. You could not live upon its preaching, there 
is not enough thought in its sermons. Its triumphs 
are not won by its words or by its ideas, but by the 



34 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 

power of the Eternal. General Booth is a man of 
power, made mighty by the indwelling of the Holy 
Ghost. He will take his rank among the greatest 
leaders in Christian history. Recently he was given 
audience by the highest of earth's kings, Ed- 
ward VII. Not long ago he made an automobile 
tour from one end of England to the other, and from 
the time he started until his journey's end the road 
was banked on both sides with continuous crowds 
of people, cheering him and praying God's bless- 
ing on him as he passed. No Roman conqueror 
of the olden time ever received such an ovation as 
that granted to General Booth in his triumphal tour 
through England. The Salvation Army has many 
things to teach us; let this one be sufficient for 
to-day : " The kingdom of God is power." 

Along with this movement at the bottom of 
society there is another movement working at the 
top, whose successes many of you have no doubt 
found it difficult to account for. I refer to that 
movement known as Christian Science. Thousands 
of people nowadays are bewildered by what seems 
to them the phenomenal growth of Christian 
Science. They do not understand why such an in- 
terpretation of Christianity should have spread so 
rapidly into all the leading nations of the earth. 
Nor can they understand how Christian Scientists 
can build such splendid temples of worship, and 
dedicate them without a dollar of debt. They can- 
not understand the enthusiam of the Christian Scien- 



RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 35 

tists, and why they are so indefatigable in their 
efforts to make converts everywhere. They also find 
it difficult to account for the abounding joy of these 
people, the large attendance at their prayer meet- 
ings, to say nothing of the numerous cures which 
are declared by trustworthy witnesses to have been 
wrought. 

How are we to explain all these things ? The 
first and easiest explanation is to say that the 
founder of Christian Science is a charlatan, and 
that the majority of Christian Scientists are dupes 
and dunces. This is the easiest of all explana- 
tions, but it is not one which is worthy or convinc- 
ing. That is the explanation which has invariably 
been offered by superficial people to account 
for every forward movement in the Christian 
world. The Reformers were counted by their 
contemporaries wicked men and their followers as 
dupes and cranks. The apostles were all put 
down as deceivers, and Jesus himself was said to 
have a devil. 

Thomas Carlyle in his " Heroes and Hero Wor- 
ship " contends that no great movement in hu- 
man history can be ascribed entirely to fraud. 
Whenever large numbers of intelligent men and 
women are moved to act together in an effort to 
better the race, there is something deeper in their 
hearts than trickery and deceit. No doubt many 
true things can be said by way of disparagement 
of many persons who profess the Christian Science 



36 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 

faith. Some have gone into the Christian Science 
movement because they have itching ears and are 
always seeking for some new thing. They once 
were Spiritualists and later on they were Esoteric 
Buddhists, they have trained in a score of different 
camps of so-called " advanced thought," and now 
for the present they have pitched their tent with 
the Christian Scientists. Such people, no doubt, 
there are, but they will not account for the Chris- 
tian Science movement. There are Christian 
Scientists who are erratic and visionary, and there 
are others who have no doubt become Christian 
Scientists for the material benefits which their 
profession brings them. 

But you cannot account for the Christian Science 
movement by pointing out the crack-brained fanat- 
ics and money makers. When the spring rains 
fall and the brook comes rushing down its bed, it 
carries in its swollen waters sticks and dead leaves 
and many a sort of rubbish, but you cannot 
account for the current by pointing to the leaves 
and sticks. Sticks do not flow, nor do dead leaves 
flow. The problem to be accounted for is not the 
sticks and leaves, but the momentum of the flood 
which carries sticks and leaves along. And so it 
is with the Christian Science current. Many a 
stick and dead leaf is floating on its rushing 
waters, but the problem still remains : What has 
given the Christian Science current its tremendous 
momentum ? 



RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 37 

How can we account for the success of this new 
interpretation of the Bible? Certainly not by 
pointing to its words. In the realm of language 
it is pathetically weak and meagre. The volume 
written by its founder is a specimen of cheap and 
tawdry English. One cannot read a chapter of it 
without having conclusive evidence that its author 
is an ignorant woman, absolutely innocent of all 
literary skill. Her language has the pretentious- 
ness, the floridness, and the stilted, high-flown 
splendor of the essay of a High School girl. 
There are Christian Science writers who have a 
better command of English than Mrs. Eddy, but 
none of their literature has in it any marks of dis- 
tinction. Certainly we cannot account for Chris- 
tian Science victories by referring to its words. 
And yet it must be admitted that even the words 
of Christian Science have an appreciable influence 
on the minds of a certain class of people. Many 
of the expressions of Christian Science are novel, 
and because of their novelty they arrest attention. 

Not a little of the attraction of Ralph Waldo 
Emerson is due to his vocabulary. He was 
descended from a line of Christian ministers, and 
the word God had been worn threadbare in the 
Emersonian home. Emerson was tired of the 
word. It had become to his ears commonplace, 
and so for the most part he avoids it in his writings. 
He believes in God, but he does not call him God. 
He substitutes other names for the traditional 



38 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 

name. One of his favorite names is " Over Soul." 
By " Over Soul " he means God. The novelty of 
the name appeals to the imagination of young 
people, and many a young man will talk with en- 
thusiasm about the " Over Soul," that would be 
ashamed to show any special interest in God. St. 
Paul says : " Set your affections on things above." 
That exhortation has been dinned into people's 
ears for 1900 years. Emerson was sick of it. He 
expressed the same idea in an Emersonian way: 
" Hitch your wagon to a star." In this phrase he 
says what St. Paul says, but the very freshness of 
the phraseology reaches the heart, and all sorts of 
people have been helped by the Emersonian lan- 
guage who would have passed by the language of 
St. Paul as simply a pious platitude. 

Christian Science has a curious nomenclature. 
All sorts of new phrases are used in curious ways, 
but when they are closely scrutinized one discovers 
that they simply express the old facts and the old 
truths. But, admitting the influence of its new 
phrases, we cannot account for the success of Chris- 
tian Science by its words. 

Nor can we account for its victories by its ideas. 
Christian Science is poor in ideas. All of its ideas 
are old, and many of them are antiquated. Its 
philosophy is exceedingly crude, and its use of the 
Scriptures is belated and fantastic. It has adopted 
a method of using the Bible which has been dis- 
carded by all people who know what the Scriptures 



RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 39 

really are. It is singular that a body of people 
professing to be advanced should take up with the 
old proof -text method of using the Bible which was 
in vogue in the days of our fathers. By proof -text 
method I mean the method of dipping into the 
Bible at any point whatsoever, lifting up one sen- 
tence, and proving your proposition by that sen- 
tence. 

That is what men did in the seventeenth century. 
They reached down into the Old Testament and 
picked up this sentence : " Thou shalt not suffer 
a witch to live," and accepting that sentence as 
the unchangeable will of God they proceeded to 
put women to death who were accused of witch- 
craft. There is no absurdity and there is no mon- 
strosity which cannot be proved by that method of 
using the Scriptures. The Christian Scientists have 
a way of picking up isolated sentences, and using 
them as though they were detached oracles of God 
from which there could be no dissent. Every in- 
formed person knows that every text must be inter- 
preted through its context. We must know what 
goes before and what comes after. Moreover, no 
one book of the Bible can be allowed to settle car- 
dinal matters alone. When we speak of the teach- 
ing of the Scriptures, it must be their teaching from 
beginning to end, the teaching conveyed by the 
general trend of their thought. And not only this, 
but the Bible must be interpreted in the light of 
history, and the words which Jesus and the apos- 



40 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 

ties spoke must be unfolded by that Holy Spirit 
which has been granted to the saints of nineteen 
Christian centuries. 

Strange to say, Christian Science has also gone 
back and taken up the mystical method of inter- 
pretation, a method which wrought incalculable 
mischief in the middle ages, but which has been 
discarded by every school of thought which has the 
slightest claim upon the respect of intelligent peo- 
ple. Under the sway of the mystical method every 
conceivable sort of nonsense was read into the 
Scriptures, and that is precisely what Christian Sci- 
ence is doing in our day. Some of the interpreta- 
tions given to well-known passages of Scriptures by 
the founder of Christian Science are so grotesque 
and so ludicrous that it is surprising they should 
be accepted by any one of sane mind. 

The whole method of using the Scriptures as 
taught by Christian Scientists is belated and demor- 
alizing. The Christian Science leaders are men 
and women who are not learned in the history of 
philosophy, or the history of theology, or the history 
of interpretation, and their pretentious use of the 
Bible could make no impression upon any one who 
is not more ignorant than they themselves. We 
cannot account for the hold which Christian Science 
has upon large numbers of people by taking into 
consideration its ideas. 

How are we to account, then, for its progress ? 
In my judgment the only adequate explanation is 



RELIGION- AS A FORM OF POWER 41 

that Christian Science from first to last conceives 
religion as a form of power. It believes in mighty 
deeds. It believes that the Eternal mind is still 
capable of doing wondrous things. It believes 
that Jesus of Nazareth was a worker of miracles, 
and that miracles are possible in our day. It leads 
men to expect large things from God, it stirs in 
their hearts the spirit of expectation. It aims to 
create at the very start absolute trust in infinite 
Love. 

In a Christian Science church you are always 
hearing of what God is doing. In every Christian 
Science prayer meeting you constantly hear of 
what God has really done. The words amount to 
nothing, the ideas amount to little, but through the 
whole Christian Science world there runs the great 
conception of Christianity as a form of power. 
Because of this conception wonderful things have 
happened. Men and women are converted in Chris- 
tian Science churches just as truly as they are 
converted in the Bowery Mission or in the Salvation 
Army. In all parts of the country there have been 
the most marvelous transformations of temper and 
disposition. Men and women have been really born 
again. Those who have been made wretched by 
their fears — who have been afraid of a draught, 
and of the night air, and of the sun, and of the 
damp, and of their own shadow, and of everything 
— have passed under the influence of Christian 
Science teachers and have found deliverance from 



is 



42 RELIGION- AS A FORM OF POWER 

all their fears, so that they have gone forth exulting 
in the liberty that belongs to the sons of God. 

Others have been worn out by worry, one of the 
most destructive of all sins. They have worried 
about themselves, about their health, their fortune, 
their property, their children, their friends, their 
neighbors, their city, their nation, the world. They 
have worried about everything. And then at last 
they have come under the influence of Christian 
Science teachers and have learned that it is not 
necessary for a human soul to worry at all, that all 
worries can be once and forever cast off, and cast- 
ing their care on One who is able to bear it, they 
have faced life again with a heart courageous and 
songful. Others have been delivered from the 
demon of hate. For years they have been critical 
and captious. They have nursed their enmities 
and grudges, they have been envious and jealous 
and suspicious, not knowing that there was any 
deliverance for their souls. By and by they came 
under the influence of some Christian Science 
teacher, and learned the better way. To their 
amazement the old hateful disposition was removed 
and their heart overflowed with love. 

Diseases not a few have also been completely 
cured. There is no reason whatsoever for doubt- 
ing the genuineness of thousands of cures which 
Christian Science claims. Undoubtedly many 
men and women have, under the influence of the 
new life which has come to them through the 



RELIGION- AS A FORM OF POWER 43 

teaching of Christian Science, thrown off physical 
infirmities and bodily weaknesses by which they 
had been afflicted for many years. Many diseases 
can be shaken off by simply lifting up the tone 
of the interior life. Elizabeth Barrett was a sick 
woman, confined to her bed, and Robert Browning 
called upon her. She fell in love with him, and 
her love for him lifted her out of bed and gave her 
health again. A great love will in some cases 
restore one to health. 

And so will a great ambition, and so, sometimes, 
will a great work, and so, sometimes, will a great 
burden, and so, sometimes, will a great hope. Any- 
thing that quickens the emotions and fills the 
heart with thoughts of God must have its influence 
upon every organ of the body, and make it more 
difficult for disease to work its ravages there. 
Christian Science does not deceive us when it 
points to the long line of happy people who have 
been brought back to health again by its minis- 
trations. 

At this point we are ready to account for certain 
things which possibly have perplexed you. Why 
is it that you cannot shake the faith of a Christian 
Scientist in his belief ? If you have ever tried it, 
you know that you have tried in vain. They are 
as immovable as Gibraltar. No sort of logic or 
argument has the slightest effect upon them. This 
is because their faith is founded on experience. 
Experience is the firmest rock there is. A man is 



44 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 

always ready to stand upon a thing that he knows 
because the thing has happened in himself. There 
was a blind man in Jerusalem whose eyes Jesus 
opened. The enemies of Jesus at once surrounded 
him, trying to make him out a liar, declaring to his 
face that he had never been blind at all. When 
indubitable proof was brought that the man had 
really been blind, his accusers then turned upon 
Jesus, claiming that he was a blasphemer, and a 
fraud. To all their arguments and accusations 
the man had but one reply : " Whether he is a 
sinner or not I do not know, but this one thing I 
know, that whereas I was blind now I see." With 
that simple affirmation on his lips he stood and 
faced all the learned people of Jerusalem. The 
Sanhedrin could not make him budge an inch. 

So it is with the man or woman who has really 
been blest through Christian Science. You may 
make fun of Mrs. Eddy, you may expatiate upon 
her money-making instincts, you may ridicule her 
rhetoric and pour scorn upon her ideas, but all 
that you may say has not the slightest influence, 
for the person will calmly say : " Whereas I was 
once what I was, now I am what I am." The 
reason Christian Scientists cannot be moved either 
by our arguments or our ridicule is because they 
are conscious of having received blessings which 
never came to them before they embraced the new 
faith. 

And here also we find the explanation of why 



RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 45 

Christian Science money flows in such surprising 
streams. It is proverbial that churches find it 
difficult to raise money, but now there is in our 
midst a church which knows no such thing as a 
deficit. It builds its churches of the finest and 
costliest materials, erecting at the present time a 
church in Boston costing two million dollars, and 
the money is forthcoming without any conscious 
effort. How will you account for that ? The 
usual interpretation is that Christian Science works 
simply among the rich, that she turns her back 
upon the poor, that she keeps far away from the 
slums, and spends all her energies upon the people 
who live in the best sections of the city and who 
are abundantly able to pay largely for the blessings 
which they receive. Now it is true that Christian 
Science confines itself to the better classes of 
society. Its special province is the wives and 
daughters of rich men. It does not have that 
missionary spirit which sent the apostles among the 
poor and which keeps the Salvation Army working 
in our slums. 

But when all this is said you have not yet ac- 
counted for the fact that Christian Science churches 
have money in abundance. They get money from 
the rich, but the question is, how do they get it ? 
It is easier to get money from poor people 
than it is from rich people. Rich women ordinarily 
take no delight in building churches; rich men are 
not in the habit of throwing their money into 



V 



l/ 



46 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 

religious causes. If Christian Scientists get such 
enormous sums of money from the pockets of the 
rich, we are face to face with this question : How 
are they able to work this wonder ? 

There is but one adequate explanation, and that is 
the money is given out of gratitude. It is because 
these men and women have been genuinely helped 
that they give their money without stint. There 
is no feeling in this world so generous as gratitude. 
Gratitude is love flowing toward a benefactor. In 
the presence of my benefactor, filled with memories 
of what he has done for me, I will count my purse 
but trash and will give him everything it holds. 
Christian Science churches would never get the 
money, were it not that genuine blessings have 
come to those from whose pockets the money 
comes. 

Some one at this point may say, then why should 
we not all become Christian Scientists if Christian 
Science is able to do these mighty deeds ? The 
answer is that Christian Science does some mighty 
deeds, and also other deeds which are horrible. 
Whenever I pick up a book recounting the beauti- 
ful things which Christian Science has performed, 
I think of another book that will never be fully 
known until the Judgment Day — a book of tragedy 
and horror, of torture, agony and death. Wherever 
Christian Science goes it lifts some people out of 
despondency and sickness, and sends them on their 
way rejoicing, and wherever it goes it also shortens 



RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 47 

^ lives and sends men and women to premature 
graves. O, the needless pain that innocent women 
and children have suffered, the indescribable tor- 
ture that has come to some of the noblest of God's 
children, all because of the erroneous teaching of this 
new religion, which claims to teach in Jesus' name. 

Only recently I was called to see a sick woman 
at one of our hotels. She had been confined to 
her bed for several days suffering excruciating 
pain. Among her friends there was a Christian 
Scientist, who came to her with bold promises of 
giving immediate relief. She assured the sick 
woman that there was nothing the matter with 
her, and that it was possible for her to leave her 
bed and walk. Taking upon her lips the words of 
Simon Peter, she said to the woman on the bed : 
" In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, I command 
you to get up and walk." The poor invalid, not 
knowing what to think and trusting that somehow 
she might possibly be healed, acted upon the word, 
and all the while suffering the greatest torture, she 
endeavored to make her way across the room, only 
to fall at last in an agony which brought on a hem- 
orrhage from which she a few days later died. 

That is Christian Science on its horrible side. 
It makes its progress because it carries in its mes- 
sage a mighty truth, but it has wrapped round and 
round the truth the most egregious and fearful 
errors, which bring ruin, desolation, death. I am 
sometimes asked the question, how long will it 



48 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 

last ? The answer is, until it has registered its 
protest and done the work which has been given it 
to do. Christian Science is a protest against the 
awful materialism of our age. When it started, 
forty years ago, a little band of English writers 
had made it difficult to believe that Christ worked 
miracles. John Tyndall, Thomas Huxley, Matthew 
Arnold, and George Eliot, by their inimitable style, 
caught and held the attention of the world and 
breathed into the minds of men on both sides of 
the sea a distrust of all stories of the miraculous. 
Even ministers of the gospel were affected by the 
atmosphere in which they lived, and in many a 
pulpit there preached a man who did not empha- 
size the mighty power of God. 

It was at this crisis that the founder of Christian 
Science arose and, in defiance of the opinion of her 
day, not only claimed all the miracles of Jesus of 
Nazareth as genuine, but asserted that just such 
mighty things can be done to-day. Her teaching 
was a protest against the entire materialistic con- 
ception of man. Man was desperately sick, and 
the world was trying to cure him with drugs. The 
root cause of his sickness was studiously ignored. 
His ailments had multiplied, and so also had the 
remedies. Men were being dosed with opiates 
and narcotics and all sorts of poisonous drugs. 
Charlatans by the thousand were pretending to 
cure, when they could bring only superficial and 
temporary relief. 



RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 49 

Would you know to what dimensions the patent- 
medicine fraud of this country has reached, it is 
necessary only to read the articles of Samuel Hop- 
kins Adams which have appeared in recent num- 
bers of Colliers Weekly. Even to-day the people 
of this country swill down seventy-five mil- 
lions of dollars' worth of drugs every year. No 
greater fraud is known in the entire history 
of the world than the patent-medicine fraud 
of the United States. When the night was at its 
darkest the founder of Christian Science arose and 
declared with the fervor of a prophet of the Lord 
that the root cause of disease is in the spirit. 

Man is a spiritual being, and he is to be cured 
after all by taking that fact into account. He 
must be told that he is a son of the Eternal, and not 
an animal that can be soaked indefinitely in drugs. 
Remove lust, and intemperance, and gluttony, and 
sloth, and vanity, and hate, and fear, and worry 
and the large proportion of all the diseases in the 
world will have completely vanished in the third 
generation. In protesting against the materialistic 
conception of the world, and the materialistic con- 
ception of man, Christian Science has done a large 
service. 

How long will the movement last? Until its 
protest is registered and the right emphasis has 
been placed again on the omnipotence of God. 
Every religious movement that awakens the en- 
thusiasm and affection of large numbers of people 



50 RELIGION AS A FORM OF POWER 

makes a contribution to the spiritual development 
of the world. No matter with what errors it may 
come, or in what vagaries and delusions it may be 
immeshed, God will make use of it in the education 
of men. It is for us, then, who are not Christian 
Scientists and who never expect to become such, 
to follow the advice which St. Paul gave to his 
converts in Thessalonica : " Prove all things, hold 
fast that which is good." 

This is good : Belief in the power of God. He 
is the Almighty One. He alone does marvelous 
things. We are his children. In us he is able to 
work great transformations. Through his power 
and grace our life may be transfigured. Op- 
pose Christian Science as a church with all your 
strength. Discard it as a philosophy, for it is mis- 
taken. Reject it as a science, for it is mischiev- 
ous. Recoil from it as an interpretation of Chris- 
tianity, for it is defective and deceptive. Resist it 
with all your might and keep your friends, if you 
can, from coming under the sway of its pernicious 
doctrines. But do not attempt to vanquish it by 
making fun of it, or by ascribing evil motives to 
the leaders of it. Conquer it by the power of God 
in your own heart and life. Overcome the evil 
which it carries with it by the goodness which 
abounds in your own soul because the great God 
has redeemed you and because his Son lives in 
you and works through you. 



Ill 

THE PERSON OF CHRIST 



Delivered in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, Febru- 
ary 19, 1899. 



5 2 



Ill 

THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

" What manner of man is this ? " 

— Matt. viii. 27. 

So cried the men upon the boat when the storm 
fell dead at the command of Jesus. Jesus had 
been asleep. Worn with labor, he was physically 
exhausted. Like all tired men, he restored himself 
in sleep. But while he slept a storm came down 
on Galilee. It grew until it seemed the fragile 
boat must certainly succumb. In consternation 
the disciples rushed to him, exclaiming, "Master, 
save us or we perish." Opening his eyes and 
looking calmly into the face of the storm, he re- 
buked it and there was a great calm. Here again 
in the life of Jesus the human and the divine have 
flashed out in startling contrast. A man asleep 
has aroused himself to do what God alone is able 
to perform. No wonder the disciples were be- 
wildered and that their wonder broke into speech. 
"What manner of man is this?" was all their 
astonished lips could utter. The world has been 
asking the same question ever since. 

On a recent Sunday morning we studied the 
53 



54 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

humanity of Jesus, and on a subsequent Sunday- 
morning the deity of Jesus was our topic. The 
question which I wish to discuss with you this 
morning is, How were the humanity and the di- 
vinity combined ? What manner of man is this ? 
The problem is a perennial one. Each generation 
of Christians is obliged to grapple with it and 
work out an answer more or less acceptable to the 
reason and satisfactory to the heart. According 
to the explicit declaration of the gospels Jesus was 
a man. He was made in all things like unto his 
brethren. He was tempted at all points even as 
we are. He was subject to the limitations of our 
humanity. He was under the law of development. 
He was in every part of his nature intensely and 
genuinely human. But according to the explicit 
statements of the gospels Jesus was more than 
man. His knowledge and power and goodness 
all transcended those of ordinary men, and he 
stood out before the men who knew him, unique, 
unparalleled, unapproached and unapproachable. 
Time is a great leveler, and many great men are 
by the ages stripped of their crowns. Not so with 
Jesus. He grows with the progress of the 
centuries. And the disciples' question is increas- 
ingly urgent : "What manner of man is this ? " 

The New Testament says that Jesus was human. 
The New Testament also says that Jesus was 
divine. He had the powers of man and of God. 
How to combine these two sets of attributes in 



THE PERSON OF CHRIST 55 

such a way as to leave for us a person whom we 
can understand and love is a question by which 
all the generations have been perplexed. Every 
thinking Christian is obliged to meet this mystery. 
The moment we begin to think about what the 
gospels say of Christ, we find ourselves bewildered 
by statements apparently contradictory, and baffled 
by the spectacle of a person who eludes analysis 
and defies classification. Boys and girls feel the 
pressure of the problem, and ask all sorts of 
puzzling questions. Aged saints at the end of life 
still look with anxious eyes into a mystery they 
cannot solve. The only way to escape the problem 
is not to think about it. But that is more than 
escaping the problem, it is abdicating our man- 
hood. To refuse to think, is to cast away our 
chief glory as rational beings. God has created 
us to think. We are commanded to love the Lord 
our God with all our mind as well as with all our 
heart. And he who makes no serious effort to 
apprehend the person of Christ is turning his 
back upon the most precious privilege offered to 
the mind of man. No other problem in the entire 
realm of human thought is so fascinating as is 
this. 

In the history of religion the person of Jesus is 
the crowning wonder. Personality in every man 
is a mystery. Its mysteriousness increases as we 
rise in the scale of intellectual power and spiritual 
insight. It is easier to understand a Hottentot 



56 THE PERSON' OF CHRIST 

than a Gladstone, and to account for a Red Indian 
than a Shakespeare. But when we come to the 
person of Jesus we are confronted by a person- 
ality more complex than all others. In him are 
mysteries which both bewilder and inspire. What 
manner of man is this ? If he were man as 
Gautama, Confucius, Zoroaster, and Mohammed 
were men, he still would be a mystery, but the 
gospels make him more than these. If he were 
simply God — knowing all, all powerful, free from 
temptation, limitation, ignorance, development, 
and death — some explanation of his person might 
seem to lie within our reach ; but he combines the 
attributes of both man and God. It is in the 
union of these two sets of capacities and powers 
that the heart of the mystery lies. 

This, then, is the problem upon which fifty 
generations of thinking men have been engaged, 
and upon which men are working still. Let us 
glance at some of the solutions which have been 
offered. 

The simplest of all solutions is to deny that 
Jesus was more than man. If he says he was, 
he was mistaken. If John says he was, John errs. 
If Paul says he was, Paul blunders. If the church 
thinks he was, it thinks so because it is super- 
stitious. That was the solution offered by the 
Ebionites in the first century, and that in substance 
is the solution offered by the humanitarians of to- 
day. Do the gospels say that Jesus was miracu- 



THE PERSON OF CHRIST $? 

lously conceived — cut that out, it is a myth. Do 
they say he arose from the dead — cut it out, it 
is a legend. Do they say he worked miracles — 
cut that out, it is an idle tale. Do they say he 
claimed to have existed before his birth — cut it 
out, he probably never said it, or if he did he 
meant he preexisted only in the mind of God. Do 
they say he claimed to be judge of men and the 
arbiter of destiny — cut it out, he was beside him- 
self. Hallucinations in great men are common. 
That is one solution. It is the easiest of all. 
Some who adopt this solution call themselves 
"advanced." But why a man should be called 
advanced because he goes back and picks up a 
theory propounded eighteen hundred years ago, 
is not at all clear. 

This theory is held by persons who are some- 
times called " advanced thinkers," although it may 
be questioned whether " thinkers" is a proper 
word to use in this connection. It requires no 
extra brain power to use a pair of scissors ; and 
to reach the conclusion that Jesus was only man 
all one needs is scissors. The substitution of a 
pair of shears for vigorous thought has often been 
made v/ith great eclat and with such consummate 
art as to blind ordinary mortals to the nature of 
the transaction. But the knack of using scissors 
ought not to be counted as conclusive evidence of 
an extraordinary endowment of brain power. We 
ought not to be hoodwinked by the sleek insinua- 



58 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

tion that those who deny the divinity of Jesus are 
thinkers above all others, far in advance of this 
superstitious and ignorant age. The simple fact 
is that the humanitarian solution is no solution at 
all. It is a sly evasion of the problem. When 
asked, what manner of man is this ? the humani- 
tarians blot out more than half the New Testa- 
ment, and build their answer on the flimsy fragment 
which remains. 

But only a few professing Christians have ever 
been willing to cut the New Testament into shreds. 
If there is a book of authentic history in the 
world, it is the New Testament. In every century 
the majority of Bible students have frankly recog- 
nized that the gospels picture Jesus as more than 
man and have honestly endeavored to give him 
his proper place in the universe of God. At the 
beginning of the fourth century there was in the 
church at Alexandria a presbyter by the name of 
Arius, a devout and noble man, a forceful thinker 
and a skillful writer. According to Arius, Christ 
is a created being, the perfect image of his father, 
higher than all angels, existing before his incar- 
nation, a middle being between God and man, 
God's agent by whom the world was created. 
Arianism was an earnest and honest effort to 
explain the person of Christ. But it did not do 
justice to all which the New Testament says. For 
more than half a century the church grappled 
with this heresy, and it was two hundred years 



THE PERSON OF CHRIST 59 

before it was finally uprooted. After its extinc- 
tion as a power in Christian theology and life it 
reappeared again and again, having isolated and 
brainy defenders. It had adherents in England 
through the seventeenth century ; among whom 
John Milton and Isaac Newton were the most re- 
nowned. Some of the early New England Uni- 
tarians were Arians. But Arianism has now 
practically vanished from the earth. As a solu- 
tion of the problem of Christ's person, it has been 
weighed in the balances and found wanting. The 
Christ of the gospels is not a sort of archangel, 
higher than man and lower than God. 

It was not until the sixteenth century that an- 
other solution of the mystery was offered. This 
time it came from an Italian by the name of Socinus. 
According to Socinus, Christ was not divine, but 
he was more than man, his attributes were beyond 
the human. He was conceived of a virgin, was 
perfectly holy, and after death was exalted to ab- 
solute power, all things being subject unto him. 
Socinus was reverent and refused to mangle the 
New Testament. He believed it was inspired by 
God, and instead of discarding the declarations 
which seemed to go contrary to his theory, he en- 
deavored to give them a consistent interpretation. 
According to Arianism, Christ was a supernatural 
being, coming down to earth. According to So- 
cinianism, Christ was a human being rising by the 
holiness of his life and the grandeur of his vie- 



6o THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

tories to the dignity and glory of God. Through 
the last three hundred years Socinianism has had 
numerous and talented defenders, but its sway has 
been only local and its triumphs have been few and 
transitory. Socianism, like Arianism, has practi- 
cally vanished from the earth. It, too, has been 
weighed in the balances of human reason and found 
wanting. The Christ of the gospels is not a man 
who climbs from the level of humanity to the 
throne of God. 

While one school of thinkers has ignored or 
obscured the divinity of Christ, another type of 
mind has just as persistently ignored his human- 
ity. In the first century a class of men arose who 
denied the reality of Christ's flesh. His body was 
a phantom, they said, his sufferings and death 
were visions. The heresy spread in all directions, 
becoming known as Gnosticism. It penetrated 
the church, and even Clement of Alexandria did 
not hesitate to say that Christ was free from all 
bodily necessities. He ate not for the sake of 
the body, but in order that it might not enter into 
the mind of those who were with him to entertain 
a different opinion of him. For over three hundred 
years the church was obliged to fight these various 
forms of Gnosticism, in order that it might estab- 
lish in the thought of the world the reality of 
Christ's humanity and safeguard the union of the 
divine and the human in his person. 

But while the leaders of the church were a unit 



THE PERSON OF CHRIST 6l 

in asserting both the divinity and the humanity of 
our Lord, how to think the union of the two was 

a problem which perplexed them all. How can 
God and man be united ? That was the question. 
In endeavoring to solve the mystery, some schol- 
ars subordinated the humanity, giving the divinity 
such sole dominating power that the humanity 
practically ceased to exist. Thus Gregory of 
Nyssa said, " As a drop of vinegar when cast 
into the sea is transformed and becomes a part of 
the sea-water, so the flesh of Christ was trans- 
formed and lost all its natural properties by union 
with the divine infinitude." Sometimes, on the 
other hand, the divine was lost sight of and the 
humanity was exalted until the deity of Jesus be- 
came an illusion or a fiction. Sometimes, as in 
the case of Nestorius, both natures were recog- 
nized, but the two natures were kept side by side 
in such a way as to make Christ two persons 
instead of one. 

From the council of Nicaea in 325 to the coun- 
cil of Chalcedon one hundred and twenty-six years 
later, the controversy over the person of Christ was 
incessant and fervent. It was at the council of Chal- 
cedon, in the middle of the fifth century, that the 
church placed on record the completest scientific 
statement of her conception of the person of the 
Redeemer. These are the words : " We unani- 
mously teach one and the same Son, our Lord 
Jesus Christ; Complete as to his godhead and com- 



62 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

plete as to his manhood ; Truly God and truly man, 
of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting, con- 
substantial with the Father as to His Godhead, and 
consubstantial also with us as to his manhood ; 
like unto us in all things, yet without sin ; As to 
His Godhead begotten of the Father before all 
worlds, but as to his manhood in these last days 
born, for us men and for our salvation, of the Vir- 
gin Mary, the mother of God ; one and the same 
Christ, Son, Lord, Only Begotten, known in two 
natures, without confusion, without conversion, 
without severance and without division ; the dis- 
tinction of the natures being in nowise abolished 
by their union, but the peculiarity of each nature 
being maintained and both concurring in one per- 
son and hypostasis. We confess not a Son di- 
vided and sundered into two persons, but one and 
the same Son, and Only Begotten and God-logos, 
our Lord Jesus Christ." 

This has stood for over fourteen hundred years 
as the completest statement ever offered by the 
church of her conception of the person of our Lord. 
But since the Reformation, thinking men in increas- 
ing numbers have felt that this creed of Chalcedon 
is defective. It sets forth the two natures of Christ, 
but it does not bring them into suitable reconcilia- 
tion with each other. It discards a double Christ, 
it denies the conversion of God into man or of 
man into God, but it gives no satisfactory explana- 
tion of that greatest of all mysteries — the union 



THE PERSON OF CHRIST 63 

of God and man. How can ignorance and omni- 
science, omnipotence and weakness, perfect holi- 
ness and the experience of temptation, be combined 
in one person ? This is the problem which will 
not down. We who have puzzled our minds and 
hearts over it, have simply passed through the 
experiences through which all thinking Christians 
have passed. 

As early as the third century one of the great- 
est thinkers the church has ever produced, Origen, 
wrote thus : " Since we see in him some things 
so human that they appear to differ in no respect 
from the common frailty of mortals, and some 
things so divine that they can apparently belong 
to nothing less than to the primal and ineffable 
nature of deity ; the narrowness of human under- 
standing can find no outlet, but, overcome with the 
amazement of a mighty admiration, knows not 
whither to withdraw, or what to take hold of, or 
whither to turn. If it think of a God, it sees a 
mortal ; if it think of a man, it beholds him return- 
ing from the grave after overthrowing the empire 
of death, laden with its spoils. 

"To utter these things in human ears, and to 
explain them in words, far surpasses the powers 
either of our rank or of our intellect and language. 
I think that it surpasses the power even of the 
holy apostles ; nay, the explanation of that mys- 
tery may be beyond the grasp of the entire crea- 
tion of celestial powers." But no matter how 



64 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

great the mystery may be, the human mind cannot 
let it alone. Many of the deepest thinkers of our 
century have devoted their lives to the problem of 
the person of Christ. 

Up to the middle of the last century the common 
explanation has been that of the creed of Chalcedon. 
The two natures have been asserted, placed side 
by side and left standing there. But in the think- 
ing of the average Christian the Christ of the creed 
of Chalcedon becomes a double-headed Christ. 
He has two consciences, two consciousnesses, two 
knowledges, two wills, — he is practically two 
persons. When Luke says he grew in wisdom, 
the ordinary explanation is : He increased in 
wisdom as a man. When he said he did not 
know, he was speaking as a man — as God he of 
course knew everything. Now people who think 
deeply are not going to submit forever to any such 
jugglery as that. A Christ who increases in wis- 
dom and yet is no wiser when a man than he was 
when a baby, a Christ who knows and who does 
not know in the same instant, a Christ who cries 
out from one side of him, "My God, My God, why 
hast thou forsaken me ? " while on the other side 
of him he is in possession of perfect felicity and 
peace, is as much of a phantom as the delusive 
Christ of the Docetists and the Gnostics. The 
whole gospel thus interpreted becomes a sham 
and a delusion. 

What manner of man is this ? Modern scholar- 



THE PERSON OF CHRIST 6$ 

ship is seeking for light in Paul's letter to the Phi- 
lippians: " Have this mind in you, which was also 
in Christ Jesus : Who, being in the form of God, 
counts it not a prize to be on an equality with 
God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a 
servant, being made in the likeness of men." The 
suggestive expression is " emptied himself." What 
does that mean ? How much is implied ? The 
Greek word for emptied is "ekenosen." Out of 
that word has come an interpretation of the person 
of Jesus which is now known as the doctrine of 
the Kenosis. Christians who adopt this view of 
Christ's person are known as Kenoticists. 

Within the last fifty years the leaders of Chris- 
tian thought on both sides of the sea have, in in- 
creasing numbers, become adherents of the Kenotic 
doctrine: such men as Delitzsch, Lange, Miiller 
in Germany, Godet in Switzerland, De Pressense 
in France, Martensen in Denmark, Canon Gore in 
England, and Henry M. Goodwin and Howard 
Crosby in our own country — these are representa- 
tives of a great host of Bible students, who have 
found relief in the doctrine of the Kenosis. What 
is this doctrine ? According to the Kenotic inter- 
pretation the Christ of the gospels is one person, 
with one consciousness and one knowledge and 
one will. 

This Christ has the limitations of our humanity. 
He grows in wisdom. He is tempted. He learns 
obedience. He is perfected through suffering. 



66 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

He is ignorant of the day of judgment, and hence 
is not omniscient. He moves from place to place, 
and hence is not omnipresent. He is destitute of 
his divine glory which he had before the world 
was. He feels himself deserted on the cross. It 
would seem, therefore, that from his birth to the 
resurrection he laid aside his divine attributes 
of omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience. 
These were his and he surrendered them. After 
the resurrection he assumed them all again. All 
authority in heaven and on earth was once more 
given to him, even as he said. In other words, the 
Son of God reduced himself to the limitations of 
humanity. He emptied himself of his divine glory 
and his divine mode of existence, and assumed the 
human mode of existence, subject to the limits of 
space and time and the laws of development and 
growth. He was ignorant and helpless as a child, 
limited in all human ways as a man. He was 
made in all things like unto us. 

We have thus thrust the mystery back another 
notch, and it now takes this form : How could the 
Son of God limit himself ? How can divine at- 
tributes be laid aside ? The answer is, by an act 
of will. The self -limitation was voluntary. Christ 
had power to lay down his life and he had power 
to take it again. We have no such power of will, 
but men, in proportion to their greatness here 
on earth, can subject themselves to self -limitations. 
The greater the man, the more completely can he 



THE PERSON OF CHRIST 6? 

go out of himself and enter into a life which is not 
his own. A mother can so pass into the life of 
her child that its sufferings hurt her more than 
they pain the child. She for the time ceases to 
feel like a woman and becomes a child. A father 
can become a boy among his children, forgetful 
for the time of all he knows and who he is. He 
empties himself and is found in the fashion of a boy. 

These outgoings of love are not parallels of the 
incarnation, but they are faint suggestions of it. 
Will power in the greatest men is amazing. The 
scholar can read or write surrounded by a crowd 
of talking people, and not hear a syllable of what 
is said. By an act of will he can limit his con- 
sciousness to a contracted area, and not know 
anything which lies outside. If man can so limit 
himself, what may God's Son do ? Who dares 
say what self-limitations are possible to infinite 
love? God is omnipotent. He is omnipotent, 
therefore, in his ability to limit himself. 

Self-abnegation — we know what it means on 
earth, what may it mean in heaven ? Self-efface- 
ment — we have caught glimpses of it in man, 
what may we see of it in the being of God? 
Jesus took upon him the form of a servant, and 
was found in the fashion of man. He acted 
through human faculties. He looked out of hu- 
man eyes ; heard through human ears ; walked 
with human feet ; suffered with a human heart ; 
thought through a human brain. The brain is 



68 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

the instrument of the mind. The cells in its gray 
matter are the key-board on which the spirit plays. 
By the destruction of any portion of the thought 
area of the brain, a man's power of thinking is 
impaired. His soul is not made less, but the con- 
sciousness of the soul is contracted. 

Only the other day a boy in the West, who lost 
his mind twelve years ago from a blow on the 
head, was cured by a surgical operation. Ra- 
tional life had been suspended for twelve long 
years because of the thickening of the skull bone, 
and the moment the pressure was relieved the 
soul of the boy uttered itself again. "Why did 
you strike me ? " was his first question on coming 
back to life again. His mind had not been lost ; 
it was only the key-board of the brain which had 
refused to respond to the stroke of the mind. So 
long as we live on earth, our spirit is dependent 
for its consciousness on the brain. Jesus had a 
human brain. Through that brain he was obliged 
to do all his thinking. On its limited key-board 
he played all the music of his life. The keys on 
which he played were like the keys on which we 
play, although his were made of finer stuff, but he 
could not, because of his brain limitations, know 
more than a perfect man can know ; or more than 
God chooses to reveal to a man who carries out 
his will. There was more in the depths of his 
personality than ever came to consciousness in 
the days of his incarnation. 



THE PERSON OF CHRIST 69 

There is more in us than has ever yet been 
unfolded. Our brain will not let out all the 
music of our spirit. In our highest moments we 
are conscious that we have that within us which 
cannot be expressed, and which only eternity will 
unfold. When we cast off these bodies, the ener- 
gies of the soul will find scope for activity and 
enjoyment impossible so long as " this muddy 
vesture of decay doth grossly close us in." 

All through his earthly life, Jesus was the eter- 
nal Son of God, but he could express only so 
much of himself as can be expressed through 
the faculties and powers of our humanity. His 
power on earth was given him by his heavenly 
Father. His power on earth was extraordinary, 
but it was not the power of the unshackled and 
omnipotent God. His knowledge on earth was 
extraordinary, but it was not the knowledge of 
the omniscient God. He had insight and fore- 
sight. He read heart secrets and foretold events 
yet to come, but Moses and Elijah and Isaiah and 
many other prophets had manifested surprising 
power in this direction. Spiritual illumination 
was given him by God Almighty as that illumi- 
nation was needed, but in every case it came 
through the human brain. He knew only what 
his Father told him, and whatever his Father 
told him, that he told to his disciples. Listen : 
"All things that I heard from my Father I 
have made known unto you." His faith, there- 



70 THE PERSON OF CHRIST 

fore, was human, like yours and mine, but stronger. 
His prayers were human, like yours and mine, but 
truer. His heartache was human, like yours and 
mine, but more intense. His knowledge was hu- 
man, like yours and mine, but vaster. His expe- 
rience was human, like yours and mine, but richer. 
For he never sinned, and did always those things 
which were pleasing unto God. He was made in 
all things like unto us. From the cradle to the 
cross he lived under the limitations of our earthly 
life. Always was he the son of God, but in the 
days of his humiliation he for our sakes became 
poor; he beggared himself that we through his 
poverty might be rich. 

This conception of the person of Christ does 
not remove all mystery, but it removes all contra- 
dictions and gives us a Redeemer who does not 
offend the reason or mock the heart. With Paul 
we still exclaim : " Without controversy great is 
the mystery of godliness : God was manifest in 
the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, 
preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the 
world, received up into glory." "O the depth of 
the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of 
God ! how unsearchable are his judgments, and 
his ways past finding out ! Of him, and through 
him, and to him, are all things: to whom be 
glory forever." 

What manner of man is this ? He is God's 
ideal man. He is our elder brother. He is our 



THE PERSON OF CHRIST Ji 

Master and our example. We see him before 
his resurrection, and we cry out, " Behold the 
man ! " After his resurrection we see him and 
with Thomas we exclaim, " My Lord and my 
God!" 



IV 



LIBERTY— ITS DANGERS AND 
DUTIES 



Delivered in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, Septem- 
ber 2J, I903. 



74 



IV 



LIBERTY — ITS DANGERS AND 
DUTIES 

" Brethren, ye have been called unto liberty ; only use not 
liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one 
another." — Gal. v. 13. 

The Epistle to the Galatians is of all Paul's 
letters preeminently the letter of freedom. It is 
one of the mightiest cries ever uttered on behalf of 
liberty. It has done more to melt the shackles from 
the human mind than any dozen books ever written. 
It is a hot, fierce, uncompromising protest against 
all the legalisms and pedantries and tyrannies and 
despotisms of man. We might call it the declara- 
tion of independence of the human soul. The gist 
of the entire letter is summed up in the words with 
which the fifth chapter opens : " Stand fast in the 
liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free." 

To this letter as to a beacon fire the champions 
of liberty have come to light their torches before 
setting out upon some new campaign ; to this letter 
as to a fountain warriors of freedom, tired and 
dust covered, defeated and discouraged, have come 

75 



j6 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 

back to drink, and found here refreshment for their 
souls ; to this letter Martin Luther came for weap- 
ons with which to batter down the pretensions and 
tyrannies of the mediaeval church ; to this letter 
two hundred years later John Wesley came for fire 
with which to warm the heart of a Christian world 
grown cold. In every land and time since Paul 
penned this letter, men chafing under the restraints 
of slavery have lifted up their heads and taken 
heart again whenever they have heard this glad 
announcement : " Brethren, ye have been called 
unto liberty." 

But the letter to the Galatians is not easy reading. 
It is difficult because the thought is so condensed. 
Paul's ideas are packed close together in sentences 
so short that they become enigmatic. It is one of 
the most concentrated of all Paul's writings. It is 
not to be read in a hurry, or with a desultory mind. 
Moreover, the problem with which Paul here is deal- 
ing has lost something of the urgency which it had 
in apostolic times. It is not easy for men of one age 
to throw themselves into the situation of men of 
an age two thousand years away. Paul writes in 
the phraseology not of our century but of the first. 
And even our English translation of his Greek must 
be translated into the vernacular of our ordinary 
life before his meaning becomes clear to our mind. 
Let us try this morning to go down into the central 
meaning of this epistle. 

The supreme question of the human race has 



LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 7 7 

ever been: How can man win the favor of the 
Eternal ? Professor James of Harvard in his latest 
book, entitled, "Varieties of Religious Experience," 
has sifted the phenomena of the religious con- 
sciousness of the race and come to the conclusion 
that the one experience which has been constant 
from the beginning is the feeling that man is not 
right, and that it is well with his soul only when 
he has allied himself to the higher powers. 

How is a man to win the favor of heaven ? That 
is the age-long question, and to that question various 
answers have been given. One of the earliest an- 
swers was, man must humiliate himself, render him- 
self uncomfortable and bring himself down in abject 
misery to the dust ; only thus can he show his con- 
trition, and only thus can he win the smile of the 
Eternal. Under the influence of this idea men in 
every age and in almost every land have starved 
themselves and beaten themselves and slept on 
stones and lacerated their flesh and mutilated their 
bodies and subjected themselves to all sorts of 
torture, thinking that by the degradation of their 
body they were doing something which would make 
their entrance into heaven certain. That has been 
the idea of barbarians everywhere, and the idea 
survives long after men have won the right to be 
counted civilized. 

But sooner or later this idea of physical suffering 
is inevitably left behind. Men come to see that 
God is not to be appeased by the shedding of 



78 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 

human blood. To the question : What must man 
do to win the favor of the Most High, the answer is : 
He must worship ; he must offer sacrifices, he must 
put upon the altar that which is of value to him ; 
he must observe certain feasts and fasts, he must 
go through the elaborate forms of a prescribed 
ritual. Only as he observes the ceremonies laid 
down by the ordained officials of religion is it possi- 
ble for the soul to be at peace with God. 

But even this idea does not long satisfy the grow- 
ing human heart. Worship becomes monotonous 
and sacrifices lose the significance which they once 
possessed. The time at last arrives when the mind 
sees that it is not by religious forms and ceremonies 
but by the actions of the obedient will that God's 
heart can be touched and his favor won. It is not 
by praying or singing, bowing or offering sacrifices, 
that God's protection is secured, but by the per- 
formance of noble deeds, and the multiplication of 
good works. If a man, then, is to win the favor of 
the Eternal, let him go to work and fill the days 
with gracious deeds. 

These are the three answers which the world 
has always given to the question, What must a man 
do to win the favor of God ? All these three an- 
swers were given among the population of Galatia. 
There were men living there who believed that the 
eternal powers are never satisfied save by the humil- 
iation of the body. The leading goddess of the 
country was Cybele, and her devotees won her favor 



LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 79 

by mutilation of the flesh. There were others to 
whom all such physical crucifixion was abhorrent, 
who found relief in offering sacrifices. They gave 
to the gods presents, they had their holy times and 
seasons, their appointed fasts and feasts. To be 
punctilious in the observance of every ceremony 
and in the keeping of every holy day, this was 
supposed to win for men abundant entrance into 
heaven. There were others to whom no word was 
great but the word obedience. All formalities of 
every sort were hollow and worthless in their eyes. 
Submission to God's law, this and this alone was 
the price of the favor of the Eternal. A man, 
these men said, must earn God's favor, and he must 
earn it by a life filled with obedient deeds. 

But into this world ruled by these three different 
conceptions the Apostle steps, boldly declaring 
that all three conceptions are wrong. A man, Paul 
says, does not win God's favor by physical degrada- 
tion or ecclesiastical ceremony, or by obeying the 
Decalogue. There is nothing, he asserts, which a 
man can do which will win him the favor of God. 
It is not possible for him to crawl into it, or to climb 
up to it, or to earn it, or to buy it. A man has God's 
favor at the start before he has done a single thing. 
God's favor belongs to him because man is God's 
child. God has manifested his favor in the gift of 
Jesus Christ his Son- The favor of the Eternal 
Father, therefore, is not to be earned even by obe- 
dience to the law, but is simply to be accepted with 



So LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 

thanksgiving and joy. The just, Paul says, shall 
live by faith. He must believe that God is indeed 
his Father and that he has manifested his love in 
the heart of Jesus. This for Paul is the starting 
point. Unless you start there you miss the secret 
of Christianity altogether. Believe that God's favor 
is something to be earned either by sacrifices or by 
noble deeds and you have missed the glory of the 
message which the Son of God came to bring. Be- 
lieve that you have been redeemed by what God 
has done in Christ, and then go on, and live as a 
redeemed man ought to live. 

But is not this dangerous doctrine ? Indeed it 
is. There is nothing so dangerous in this world as 
liberty, except the lack of it. Wherever this doc- 
trine of salvation by faith has been preached boldly 
and with passion, it has been wrested by men to 
their own destruction. There were men in the 
first century who listening to Paul's preaching said, 
Very well, if we are dead to the law and the law 
has passed away, let us eat, drink, and be merry, 
for whatsoever we do is right. If the greater the 
sin the more abundant the grace, then let us sin 
more, that grace may still more abound. In the 
sixteenth century, under the preaching of Luther, 
crowds of men and women seized upon this idea 
of liberty and used it for an occasion to the flesh. 
Law, they said, has passed completely away. For 
the redeemed soul there is no law at all. What- 
ever a Christian wants to do and does, is right. 



LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 8 1 

Church historians call these creatures Antinomi- 
ans because they were opposed to law. 

And what took place in the sixteenth century 
under Luther took place in the eighteenth under 
Wesley, and what took place under Wesley takes 
place under the preaching of every man who 
preaches boldly the great doctrine of liberty in 
Christ. Is the doctrine false, then, because some 
men wrest it to their own destruction ? Nay ! 
Truth can never be proclaimed in a world like this 
without the possibility of somebody abusing it. 
Nobody will ever be hurt by St. Paul's doctrine if 
he will take the trouble to find out what St. Paul's 
doctrine really is. When Paul says that Christians 
are no longer under law, he means that they are no 
longer under law as external restraint. When he 
says that the law has passed away, he means that 
it has passed away as a measure of coercion, but 
he does not mean that the life of man can ever 
safely depart from the principles ordained of 
God. 

While in one sense law passes away, in another 
sense it comes back with new significance and 
authority. In one sense it dies, in another sense 
it lives with a rekindled life. It is no longer exter- 
nal restraint but internal constraint, no longer 
external compulsion but internal impulsion, no 
longer external coercion but internal aspiration. 
The law is no longer written upon stone, it is now 
written upon the tables of the heart. It no longer 



82 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 

hangs over a man's head, it is incorporated as a 
ruling principle of his life. It is no longer shackles 
by which he is bound, it is within him a new nature. 
His soul is the home of the spirit of law, and he 
looks up to God and calls him Father. 

A simple illustration will make all this clear. 
Every boy in the years of his boyhood is under 
law. His mother lays down the law that he must 
comb his hair and wash his face every morning 
before he comes to the breakfast table. That law 
is fixed and the boy is under it. Sometimes he 
chafes and wriggles under it. He wishes he could 
get out from under it. To wash one's face every 
morning, that seems the climax of bondage. If 
one could only escape, now and then, life would have 
new zest and value. Probably the boy never lived 
who did not at some time during his boyhood stand 
appalled at the idea that it would be necessary for 
him to wash his face and comb his hair every morn- 
ing of every week of every month of every year of 
his life. The boy is indeed under law, but little by 
little the law loses its force. Little by little it 
vanishes from sight, until the young man is no 
longer under this law at all. But does he wash his 
face and comb his hair ? He does. Not because 
he is under law, but because the law is now in him. 
The external rule has become a guiding principle, 
the tyrannical command has now become a second 
nature. He no longer washes his face because he 
is compelled to do it, but because he wants to do it. 



LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 83 

It is his nature to do it. He would be uncomfort- 
able if the washing were not done. He is dead 
unto the law because the spirit of the law has found 
its home in his soul. 

Now the ideal Christian life is the life in which 
all law has passed away. There is no longer any 
feeling of restraint from without. All life is 
ordered and directed from within. And just as a 
man rises in the art of living he finds that laws of 
all sorts lose their sovereignty over his mind. How 
many laws on the statute books are dead laws to 
us. We never think of them. We care nothing 
for them. So far as we are concerned, they have 
completely passed away. You and I are not under 
the law against murder. We never on waking in 
the morning sigh at the thought that it will not 
be possible for us to kill some one before night. 
We do not want to murder. It is not our nature 
to do such things. The law is not over us, it is 
incorporated in our heart, and we are not conscious 
of its presence. 

And as with murder, so with drunkenness. 
There are men in our community for whom all 
laws against drunkenness are irksome and tyranni- 
cal, they interfere with freedom. " What business 
is it of the city," these men say, " whether we are 
drunk or not ? " Life to such men would be far 
more pleasant if every man were permitted to get 
drunk when and where he pleases. They are yet 
under the law. For us the law has died and we 



84 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 

are free. And so with thieving. There are men 
who feel that their personal liberty is curtailed 
because the legislature has declared that a man 
must not steal. They are under the law. You 
and I are unconscious of the law. It has no ex- 
istence for us. We are never tempted to break 
open a man's house and steal his silver spoons. 
We are no longer coerced, we are free. I once 
knew a man in New England who had a record. 
How many crimes he had committed I do not 
know, but he was a man known to the police in 
many cities. One day he came to my study here 
in New York. He was in a fever of excitement. 
He looked like a wild animal pursued by dogs. 

The first thing he said to me was : " They have 
recognized me. I have got to get out of here. It 
will not be safe to stay another hour." I asked 
him who it was that had recognized him. He 
said it was the policemen. He no longer dared 
to walk down Broadway. The eyes of all the 
policemen were on him. And to be arrested 
meant imprisonment for some offense long since 
committed. Walking the streets of this free city 
was misery to him. He was under the law, and 
the law was to him a curse. But you and I are 
not under the law. We do not look at the police- 
men nor do they look at us. We go where we 
please, in any part of the city, and no officer of the 
law molests us or makes us afraid. We are not 
under the law because the law is in us. 



LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 85 

When, therefore, Paul tells men that they are no 
longer under the law, he takes care to guard him- 
self against misconception. He will not close this 
letter without sounding a solemn word of warning. 
Brethren, he says, you have been called unto lib- 
erty, only use not liberty for an occasion to the 
flesh. Of all St. Paul's warnings, this is the one 
most needed by our times. The trouble with 
America is not too much liberty, but liberty used 
in mischievous ways. The Christian church is not 
too free, but there are too many people in the 
church who do not know how to use their freedom. 
Many men have been obliged to buy their freedom 
at a great cost, but you and I were born to free- 
dom ; we breathed the atmosphere of liberty when 
we were rocked in the cradle, and all our life has 
been lived under a flag every star of which is sug- 
gestive of liberty. 

There is no need of any man urging us to stand 
fast in the liberty wherewith we have been made 
free. But, alas, thousands of Americans need to 
listen to the warning which Paul gave to the Gala- 
tians : " Brethren, you have been called unto liberty ; 
only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh." 
The duties and responsibilities of liberty, these are 
things concerning which alLof us should think. The 
abuses and dangers of freedom, against these every 
thoughtful man should be on his guard. See what 
havoc is wrought in the Christian church because 
men use their liberty for an occasion to the flesh. 



86 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 

It was once supposed that a man could win 
God's favor by attending public worship. You 
and I believe that no longer. It belittles God to 
make him a Being capable of opening his heart 
only on condition of our willingness to go to 
church. Churchgoing is not essential to win his 
favor. We have his good-will already. We are 
therefore free, and, believing this, many a man uses 
his freedom for an occasion to the flesh. He does 
not go to church. He sits at home and lolls in 
an easy chair and skims the Sunday newspaper. 
The law of public worship has passed away as ex- 
ternal compulsion, and the law has not appeared 
in that man's soul as reverent desire to know God. 

It has been taught and believed that unless a 
man took the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper 
he would forfeit his place in heaven. You and I 
have never accepted that. We do not believe that 
the heart of the Eternal God can be opened by a 
man's willingness to eat a crumb of bread or take 
a sip of wine even though he may do this inside 
the place of prayer. We have been called unto 
liberty and none of these things are binding on us, 
and, puffed up with the knowledge of this, many a 
man never comes to the Lord's table at all. Be- 
cause he is at liberty to stay away, he uses his 
liberty for an occasion to the flesh. One would 
suppose that a man, although a free man, if he 
had in him the spirit of Jesus would be glad to 
comply with his dying request. 



LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 8? 

You and I do not believe that by the giving of 
our money we can ever earn the love of our Heav- 
enly Father. The little contributions which we 
lay upon the plate are poor and paltry things, and 
what are we but stewards intrusted with what God 
has first given unto us ? It is not necessary to 
give, then, in order that God may smile upon us. 
Misled by this, many a man spends his dollars in 
the store and the club and saves his pennies for 
the church. Realizing that he has been called to 
liberty, he uses his liberty for an occasion to the 
flesh, and consents to do an unmanly thing. In 
many parts of Christendom it has long been cus- 
tomary for the Lord's followers to confess their 
sins to church officials. The confessional was 
swept away by the Reformation, and you and I 
would not endure it, no, not for an hour. 

But because Protestants are not obliged to con- 
fess their sins to their pastor, too many professing 
church members never confess their sins at all. 
They use their liberty for an occasion to the flesh. 
Many Christian congregations have done away 
entirely with all books of prayer. It was once 
supposed essential to order and decency, that all 
members of the congregation when they came 
together should pray the same prayer. We have 
thrown prayer books away, but many of us, exult- 
ing in our liberty, use our liberty for an occasion 
to the flesh, and when we come into the Lord's 
house we do not pray at all. O, Saul of Tarsus, if 



88 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 

thou wert here upon the earth thou surely wouldst 
say to us what thou didst say to the Galatians : 
" Brethren, ye have been called unto liberty : only 
use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh." 

And is not this warning needed by our poor 
Republic, all torn by many dissensions and heavy 
laden with many burdens ! We Americans are 
not too free, but we are great abusers of our free- 
dom. Ours is a free press, and we would not have 
it anything else than free. We could not endure 
a press doctored by the Sultan, nor could we be 
content with papers scissored by a censor ap- 
pointed by some Czar. 

One of the crowning glories of America is its 
free press. A press muzzled or gagged is a press 
of which to be ashamed. But how has this free- 
dom been abused ! In every American city un- 
scrupulous and greedy men, eager to swell their 
circulation in order to increase the size of their 
fortune, have made their papers minister to the 
flesh. They have gone through the sewers and 
the cesspools for material with which to fill their 
columns. They have uncovered the ulcers and the 
leprosies of society and spread them out before the 
eyes of growing boys and girls. They have ex- 
ploited the doings of rich fools and harlots and sui- 
cides and murderers. They have hounded men in 
the secrecy of their homes and shouted from the 
housetops things that should never have been told. 
They have been vultures plunging their accursed 



LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 89 

beaks into the putrescent carcasses of vice and 
crime, harpies that have defiled our breakfast and 
our dinner tables. What shall we do ? Take away 
the freedom of the press ? Never. All we can say- 
is : Brethren of the press, you have been called 
unto liberty, only use not your liberty for an occa- 
sion to the flesh. 

We have a free government. Ours is a country 
for the people, of the people, and by the people. 
In many a land no such liberty as ours is known. 
In parts of Europe the safety of the country is 
supposed to depend upon the existence of a large 
standing army. Every young man on reaching a 
certain age is compelled to give himself up to 
army discipline. He is taught to stand erect and 
to keep step with his fellows, and in his heart 
there is built up a steadfast devotion to his father- 
land. Whether men believe in the army or not, 
whether they care for military discipline or not, to 
the army they must go and to military discipline 
they must submit. In this country we have a 
standing army, but our soldiers are armed, not with 
bayonets but with ballots, little pieces of paper. 
These are placed in every hand, and by the use 
of these bits of paper the glory of the country is 
augmented or tarnished. But no one is compelled 
to use his bit of paper ; he is free. And because 
we Americans are not compelled to vote, thousands 
of us have been negligent in the performance of 
one of the most sacred duties which the Lord God 



90 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 

has placed upon us. The doctor has too fre- 
quently on election day attended to his patients 
and forgotten to vote, the lawyer has gone on 
pleading his cases, the merchant has gone on sell- 
ing his goods, the bookkeeper has gone on count- 
ing up his figures, the mechanic has gone on with 
his work of building — while the interests of the 
city were left neglected and the destiny of the 
nation placed in peril. Brethren, you have been 
called unto liberty, only use not your liberty for 
an occasion to the flesh. 

We have a free church. In many European 
countries religious life is bound. The life of 
society is gathered up into the hands of religious 
teachers and shepherds. Men are told w r hat they 
may read and what they must think. Days are 
established on which they must fast. In the con- 
fessional they are obliged to pour into the ears of 
their pastors the inmost secrets of their hearts. 
Thousands of men and women thus brought up 
have crossed the sea and landed on our shores. 
On arriving here they heard it said that under our 
flag every man is as good as every other man. 
They read it in the papers that every man must 
do his own thinking and stand on his own feet and 
answer to God and to God only for his thoughts 
and his deeds. They heard church authority de- 
rided and religious leaders pooh-poohed. And tak- 
ing all things into their own hands they began to 
do as they pleased. 



LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 91 

In every American city there are thousands and 
tens of thousands of men and women brought up 
under the church discipline of other lands, who 
have drifted completely away from their church 
and are living without God and without hope in 
the world. The superficial observer looking on 
this great crowd of the godless says, " Ah, there is 
Roman Catholicism for you ! " You are mistaken, 
my friend, that is not Roman Catholicism, that is 
the first effect of liberty upon people not prepared 
for it. In the fullness of time they were called to 
liberty, but when the external framework by which 
they had been bound was taken away, they had 
not sufficient strength of character within to sus- 
tain them, and so their liberty became an occasion 
for the flesh. Unprotected by the safeguards to 
which they had been accustomed, they were swept 
into divers kinds of folly and madness by the 
hurricanes which sweep across this land of the 
free. The Roman Catholic church has no more 
serious problem on its hands than to catch the ear 
once more of the men and women who were reared 
within its fold, and who under the influence of our 
American atmosphere have drifted away from 
church influences altogether. 

Let me say a word to those who have recently 
come into our city. A city is the home of liberty. 
New York City is the freest place in all the land. 
You have greater liberty on this little island of Man- 
hattan, where every square mile has its eighty-seven 



92 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 

thousand people, than you could possibly have in 
the middle of the Sahara Desert, for you can do 
a thousand things in this city which are impossible 
in the sand. And what a delightful thing liberty 
is, especially after one has felt for years the bond- 
age of a little city or a narrow rural town. In a 
little town one cannot dress as he pleases. It is 
unsafe to think, there, outside the routine chan- 
nels. There are always spies looking out for 
every false step and for every one who dares to go 
contrary to established customs. The espionage 
of a town is galling and exasperating beyond ex- 
pression. But in the city people are too busy to 
look into one another's affairs. One can dress 
as he pleases, think what he likes, go where he 
will, and the big city is neither alarmed nor 
amused. 

In the city man is free. But how difficult it is to 
use this freedom ! Only a few are strong enough 
to do it. In a little town a man is held up largely 
by his neighbors. He votes because the voting 
list is short, he becomes a member of the church 
because the church is needy, he works in the Sun- 
day school because teachers are few. He dares 
not be anything else than what he ought to be, or 
do anything else than what he ought to do, because 
held in the grip of hundreds of pairs of eyes in the 
heads of those who know him. But when that 
man or woman comes into the city, there are no eyes 
upon him save the eyes of God alone. Men can 



LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 93 

save us in the country ; only God can save us in 
the city. 

Every Christian who comes to New York City 
to make this his home comes to judgment. Not 
until he arrives here does he really know what he 
actually is. Here his life will be determined, not 
by restraint from without but by constraint from 
within. And if there be no internal constraint, New 
York is a dangerous place to be. The number of 
professing Christians who make shipwreck of their 
religious life in this great city is something appall- 
ing. In the town they joined the church. Some- 
body asked them to do it and so they did it. They 
supposed they did it because they wished to be the 
true disciples of the Lord. But now they are in 
New York City, and they do not identify themselves 
with the church. They neglect it. They turn 
their back upon it. They shun its services. They 
refuse to help bear its burdens. No love of Christ 
constrains them to do what he would have them 
do. It is evident that their Christian life in their 
former home was only a hollow sham. 

In the old home church they were teachers in the 
Sunday school or workers in the missionary soci- 
ety. They heard the call : Go into my vineyard — 
and with alacrity obeyed it. In their ignorance they 
supposed that they were led by the Spirit of God 
and were working in order to please him ; and now 
they are in New York City, but they are doing no 
church work whatever. They teach in no Sunday 



94 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 

school, their names are to be found on the book 
of no religious organization, they are constrained 
to do no Christian service, because the love of Christ 
is not in their heart. In the old church home they 
were led to work for divers reasons and from vari- 
ous motives, but their working was not Christian, it 
was not offered as a sacrifice to God. In the life 
of this great city the hollowness and mockery of 
much that has passed for religion in smaller places 
is made evident to the eyes of men. But I imagine 
I hear some one saying : " Oh, I am not needed. 
I worked in the old home church because I was 
needed there. But certainly New York churches 
need no assistance from such a humble Christian 
as I am." Who told you that you were not needed ? 
If you have heard such an assertion, you must 
have heard it from the devil, for it sounds like one 
of his lies. 

Not needed in New York ! You do not mean 
it ! You have said it without thinking ! Not needed 
in a city which is a vast Pool of Bethesda, where the 
porches are full of sick and impotent folk, men and 
women who have come here in search of health and 
have not found it, who have come seeking fortune 
and have missed it, who have come dreaming of 
fame and have failed to obtain it ! On every hand 
there are the discouraged, the disappointed, the 
lonely and the forlorn — and you dare hold up 
your head and say that in such a place, at such a 
time, you are not needed ? You are in the midst of 



LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 95 

a great mass of human beings created in God's im- 
age, hungry for the consolation of the gospel, and 
you, a professing Christian, won't help ! 

You forget what New York is. It is . the me- 
tropolis of the new world, where fashions are 
molded which will dominate the lives of millions 
of our fellow-countrymen, a city in which standards 
are fixed by which thought and conduct shall be 
bound in many a section of the land, a city in which 
every year fifteen thousand students are educated 
to go out to become leaders of society from the 
Atlantic to the Pacific, and the arbiters of the 
destiny of communities and commonwealths, and 
it may be nations. And in a city where it is so 
important that the atmosphere should be warm 
with the breath of Christ, and where it is so 
necessary that standards should be high, and that 
tone should be true, you hold up your head and say 
that you, a Christian man, a Christian woman, are 
not needed in New York ! Brethren, you have 
been called unto liberty, only do not abuse your 
liberty. You wrong yourself when you do it. 
You injure your own soul. For your own salva- 
tion I urge you to throw yourself into the life of 
the church and to abound in the works of the 
Lord. 

We say that Manhattan is an island, and so it is, 
as geographers count islands, but in another sense 
Manhattan is a river, a great, swift river on whose 
bosom there float two million barks, in God's eyes 



96 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 

immortal souls. The river is rilled with eddies, 
and here and there are dangerous currents, and 
in whatever direction we turn our eyes we see 
men and women going down. Young men who 
came to this city bright eyed and lofty minded, 
with the perfume of their mother's prayers still 
hanging round them, are going down. Young 
women who came to the city to earn a living, 
with hearts as pure as the heart of the Madonna, 
are going down. Men in middle life who suc- 
ceeded in withstanding the temptations of youth 
are unable to stand the strain which the city puts 
upon them, and in the maturity of their powers 
they are going down. Aged men almost within 
sight of the eternal harbor, they too are going 
down. All around you, men and women, God's 
children, your brothers and sisters, are going to 
destruction, and you, a professing Christian, won't 
help them, and say that you are not needed ! 

My friend, Manhattan is more than a river ; it 
is a whirlpool. The current sweeps round and 
round with an ever accelerating swirl, and human 
beings, unless their lives are hid with Christ in 
God, are sucked in and down and lost forever. 
Manhattan is a sea across which the winds are 
always blowing, and the waves are always rough. 
If you in the exercise of your freedom have not 
fallen into the habit of despising the counsel of 
all religious teachers, please listen to me when 
J tell you that on this sea it is impossible for a 



LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 97 

Christian to walk unless he holds the Master's 
hand ! 

Let us now complete St. Paul's sentence. 
"Brethren, you have been called unto liberty; 
only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, 
but through love be servants one to another." 
Does he say servant ? That is the word. Do ser- 
vants and liberty go together ? Most assuredly they 
do. There is no liberty in this world aside from 
servantship. Only those who are bound are free. 
This is one of the paradoxes of the gospel. If 
you would be free you must take the yoke. Stand 
fast in the liberty, brethren, wherewith Christ has 
set us free. Revere it. Fight for it. Keep it. 
Only do not use it for an occasion to the flesh. 
Look constantly unto Jesus, who was the freest 
man who ever walked our earth, and yet who 
walked it always as a slave. When only a boy 
he learned to pronounce that hard word " must." 
" I must be about my Father's business." Later 
on, a young man, he said : " I must work the 
works of him that sent me." Still later he de- 
clared : " I must go to Jerusalem and suffer many 
things, I must be crucified, I must rise again." 
And so he steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusa- 
lem, and as he went he said : "I have a baptism 
to be baptized with, and how am I straitened until 
it be accomplished." Always free he was, but yet 
always bound, bound by the life of God within 
him. " Lo, I come to do thy will, O God." Unto 



98 LIBERTY— DANGERS AND DUTIES 

his disciples he could say : "I do always those 
things that are pleasing unto him." Would you 
be free ? Then listen to his exhortation : " Take 
my yoke upon you and learn of me." " If the 
Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." 



V 
THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 



Delivered in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, April ij, 
1904. 



100 



THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 

" I girded thee, though thou hast not known me." 

— Isa. xlv. 5. 

" I girded thee, though hast not known me." 
God is the speaker, and Cyrus, king of Persia, is 
the person spoken to. Cyrus is the greatest man 
in the sixth century before the Christian era, one of 
the greatest of all the men who have figured in 
human history. Xenophon makes him the ideal 
prince of the ancient world. His career of con- 
quest has been unbroken and glorious. He has 
conquered Media and added it to his kingdom. 
He has taken Lydia with all her wealth and made 
her his own. Great Babylon has fallen before his 
irresistible arms, and now God is calling him to a 
service greater still, the liberation of the Hebrews. 
They are to be sent back to Jerusalem. The tem- 
ple is to be rebuilt. The fire is to be rekindled on 
the altar. The sacred utensils which Nebuchad- 
nezzar stole are to be restored to their former uses. 
For this work of emancipation Cyrus is raised up. 
He is God's anointed ; he is God's shepherd. To 
him God gives assurance of support and victory, 

IOI 

LOFC 



102 THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 

saying: "I have wooed thee, though thou hast not 
known me : I have girded thee, though thou dost 
not know me." 

Strange language this for a Hebrew prophet to 
put into the mouth of God ! Cyrus is not a Jew. 
He is a Gentile. He has no part in the covenant 
made by God with the chosen people. He is not 
a monotheist. He is a polytheist and reverences 
Merodach and all the other Babylonian gods. 
And yet to this heathen polytheist God is repre- 
sented as saying : " Thy right hand I have holden. 
I have even called thee by thy name. I girded 
thee, though thou hast not known me. " Surely 
this is a great prophet. He has grasped the truth 
that God endows men with wisdom and grace and 
power though the men themselves may be igno- 
rant of the source whence come their gifts, and 
that he uses men for the carrying out of his vast 
plans, though these men do not know the end for 
which they were born, or for what purpose they 
came into the world. The unknown God in spir- 
itual life — that is our theme this morning. 

The physiologists tell us that in the body there 
are two forms of life, the conscious and the uncon- 
scious. There are two nervous systems, the cere- 
brospinal and the sympathetic. A large part of 
our life is carried forward without any volition on 
our part and even without our knowledge. The 
heart beats day and night without waiting for our 
orders. The lungs expand and contract on their 



THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 103 

own initiative and impulse. The processes of di- 
gestion are carried forward from stage to stage 
without our attention or direction. The founda- 
tion movements of our life are conducted below 
the level of our conscious thought, and on this un- 
conscious life are built the activities of the life we 
know. The activities which lie beyond the reach 
of will and even outside the realm of conscious life 
are more essential to our welfare than the activities 
which have been placed within our knowledge and 
control. 

The psychologists are telling us that the soul, 
like the body, has its unconscious life. A large 
part of personality is as yet submerged. The 
greater part of us never comes into the field 
of consciousness. What personality is we shall 
never know until death has let life out to its com- 
pletion. There are subliminal regions, dark and 
mysterious, filled with forces which weave the tex- 
ture of our life. Out of these abysmal depths 
come our intuitions, convictions not born of the 
reason and yet able to sway and to mold our 
lives. Up from these depths feelings now and 
again surge, feelings for which reason can find 
no satisfactory explanation, and yet which con- 
stitute a " heat of inward evidence " which com- 
pels us to doubt against the sense. There are 
forces outside our conscious self that bring re- 
demption. The heart has reasons which the Rea- 
son cannot understand. The sources of our spir- 



104 THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 

itual life lie in a region which cannot be explored. 
It would seem that down below the level of con- 
scious thought God feeds the springs of feeling 
and carries on the processes of spiritual recon- 
struction. In him we live and move and have 
our being, and he does for us constantly more 
than we ask or think. He girds us, though we 
do not know him. 

This throws light upon experiences which often 
perplex us. Life is filled with surprises. We find 
ourselves doing things we never imagined we could 
do, enduring things which we were sure would 
completely crush us, overcoming difficulties which 
we had no strength to meet. We are surprised at 
ourself. People say, " I don't know how I did 
it ! " "I can't see how I lived through it." " That 
I am alive to-day is to me a mystery ! " We meas- 
ure our resources and then in imagination call up 
some awful calamity whose coming would blot the 
sun from heaven and make life unendurable, and 
then on some terrible day the dreaded calamity 
arrives, and, strange to say, we do not die ; we are 
borne up by forces of whose existence we were 
not aware, and in spite of our unspeakable mis- 
fortune we are by and by able to laugh, and even 
sing. We are perplexed, but not in despair ; cast 
down, but not destroyed. No visible hand from 
heaven is outstretched to hold us ; no angel comes 
in the hour of bloody sweat to sustain us, and yet 
we are sustained. He helps us, though we do not 



THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 105 

see him; he guides us, though we do not know 
him. 

Light is also thrown upon a phenomenon which 
has caused perplexity to many thoughtful minds, 
the appearance in heathen countries of truths and 
graces which were once supposed to be the exclu- 
sive possession of Christianity. There was a time 
when Christian men, in painting the pagan world, 
painted it black. There was not one sunbeam in 
all the terrible picture. The darkness was total. 
The degradation was complete. The religions of 
the people were a mass of error, fraud, and false- 
hood. But within fifty years the heathen world 
has been opened up to the eyes of Christendom. 
The sacred books of the East have been trans- 
lated into English. The study of comparative 
religion has gone forward until scholars know the 
contents and spirit of all the world's great faiths. 
Much that we formerly thought of heathendom 
has been found to be untrue. The darkness is 
great, but it is not total ; the degradation is ter- 
rible, but it is not complete. Outside of Christen- 
dom all is not midnight. The Christian religion 
is not the only religion which contains truth. 
There are in other literatures passages of poetry 
like unto the Hebrew psalms. There are in every 
country ethical maxims similar to some of those 
contained in the Sermon on the Mount. In every 
religion there are lofty sentiments, sublime con- 
ceptions, sound and wholesome moral precepts, 



106 THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 

and among the followers of every great religious 
teacher there are saints who manifest many of the 
graces of the disciple whom Jesus loved. Frag- 
ments of Christianity are found everywhere. 

How are we to account for this? Some men 
have satisfied themselves by saying that these out- 
croppings of Christianity in pagan lands are acci- 
dental. Ethical coincidences have come about by 
chance. These beautiful sayings of pagan poets 
are happy hits, fortunate guesses, a play of heat 
lightning in a sullen sky. Others have claimed 
that every good thing in pagan lands is borrowed 
from the Jews. The truths in non-Christian reli- 
gions all had their home in Palestine. The truth 
flowing from the mouth of Prophet and Apostle 
fell upon the earth, made its way eastward through 
mysterious subterranean channels, and bubbled up 
in life-giving springs in the midst of heathendom. 
Or else it was carried from country to country by 
faithful missionaries whose names have been lost 
to history. But why contrive an explanation so 
cumbersome and difficult, when an easier one is 
far more reasonable ? Why not go for an expla- 
nation to the first chapter of the fourth gospel ? 
"All things were made by him; without him 
was not anything made that was made. In him 
was life ; and the life was the light of men. 
He was the true light which lighteth every man 
that cometh into the world. He was in the world, 
and the world was made by him, and the world 



THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD \oj 

knew him not. He came unto his own and his 
own received him not. But as many as received 
him, to them gave he power to become the sons 
of God." 

Put a great God over the world and in it, over 
man and in him, and you will be prepared to find 
truth everywhere, and Christian graces blooming in 
all the lands. It is because God is everywhere that 
there are pearls in all the seas, and stars in all the 
skies. Men had spiritual life before Jesus of 
Nazareth taught in Galilee. He taught that men 
might have life more abundantly. There was wine 
in all the goblets : he simply filled them to the 
brim. There were dreams of immortality in many 
a sensitive heart : he brought them to the light. 
Men tell us that part of our Bible came from Egypt, 
a part from Babylon, a part from Persia, and that 
much of it was not original with the Jews. What 
of it ? If God girds men with wisdom and with 
strength, even though they misconceive his nature 
and his will, why should we not expect great 
empires like Egypt and Babylon and Persia to make 
contributions to the religious text-book of the 
world ? If there is a wideness in God's mercy like 
the wideness of the sea, we should expect it to wash 
the shores of all the world. 

When Confucius brings his common-sense, and 
Buddha his doctrine of self-abnegation, and Zo- 
roaster his conception of the conflict between good 
and evil, and Epictetus his teaching of humble sub- 



IOS THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 

mission, we need not say that these men have 
borrowed from the wise men of Palestine, but can 
easily believe that they have all sat at the feet of 
the invisible and omnipresent Christ; and if our 
ears be sensitive we can hear Christ saying: "I 
girded them although they did not know me." 
Since God is wise and also sovereign over all his 
works, we may feel assured that not one nation has 
ever walked with aimless feet, and that the moral 
achievements of no tribe or people will ever be 
destroyed or cast as rubbish to the void when God 
hath made his pile complete. 

There is another problem which perplexes many : 
How are we to account for so many good people 
outside the Christian church ? Each one of us 
has acquaintances and friends of whose moral 
integrity we are certain and whose Christian graces 
and virtues are many, and yet who are not pro- 
fessedly religious people. They do not read the 
Bible, so far as we know they do not pray, they 
do not partake of the Lord's Supper, and some of 
them do not even attend public worship. Some of 
them do not believe in Christ in any such sense as 
the church desires that men should believe in him ; 
and yet, strange to say, many of these persons are 
undoubtedly good, honest, kind, generous, and self- 
sacrificing, and a few of them are far superior in 
moral worth and spiritual attainment to many of the 
members of the church. 

How can we account for this ? The easiest thing 



THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 109 

to do is to deny that such persons are good. We 
may say that their virtues are only so much dead 
morality, that their graces are nothing more than 
the product of training in politeness, and that how- 
ever decorous in deportment, they lack the Spirit of 
God in their hearts and are therefore dead in sin, 
even when they seem to be alive. This was once 
the favorite method of dealing with the outside 
saints, but it is a method which has long since been 
discarded. Christians are no longer willing to deny 
indisputable and conspicuous facts. A flower is 
still a flower even though it blossoms all alone in 
the depths of the vast forest or grows amidst the 
weeds beside the dusty road. It will not do to say 
that a flower is not a flower because it is not grow- 
ing in our garden. God delights in producing 
lovely things in the most unexpected and surpris- 
ing places, and when we get our eyes upon them it 
is not for us to deny that they exist. 

Honesty is honesty, and kindness is kindness, 
and purity is purity, and generosity is generosity, 
and self-sacrifice is self-sacrifice, no matter where 
you find them ; and instead of weaving arguments 
by which to prove that apparent virtue must be 
something else, let us thank God for every evi- 
dence of his presence, no matter when or where 
the evidence is presented. Moreover, it is a haz- 
ardous thing to say that a man is not good because 
he does not fit into our program. That was the 
fearful blunder made by the Pharisees in dealing 



HO THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 

with Christ. They had a narrow inclosure all 
finely hedged in with rules and regulations inside 
of which every man acceptable to God was sure to 
be found. They had a schedule of pious actions 
which every genuine saint was expected to follow. 
Jesus came, and the first thing He did was to step 
over the hedge. He would not stay inside. He 
refused to follow the schedule. 

The Pharisees were shocked, alarmed, enraged. 
Jesus seemed to be a good man, at least He spoke 
gracious words and performed gentle deeds, but 
He would not stay inside the inclosure ! He had a 
beautiful spirit and lived a beautiful life, but He 
would not follow the program ! And so the 
Pharisees began to suspect Him. They doubted 
His goodness. They tried to get Him back inside 
the hedge. When He refused to go they were sure 
He was bad. His beautiful life counted for noth- 
ing. They began to jeer at Him. He went about 
doing good, but they hated Him. " He is a glut- 
ton and a wine-bibber," they sneered, " a friend of 
publicans and sinners," which, being interpreted, 
meant " Birds of a feather flock together." Later 
on some one ventured to suggest that He had a 
devil in Him, and the final conclusion was, after 
He had lived for years a life without a flaw and 
without a stain, that He was in league with the 
monarch of the infernal world. Think of that! 
Absolute goodness, perfect wisdom, supreme kind- 
ness, immeasurable self-sacrifice, all ascribed to 



THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD in 

the devil, and for no other reason than that Jesus 
did not fit into the church program, and refused 
to stay inside of the ecclesiastical inclosure. May 
God save us from committing so heinous a sin ! 

What shall we say then ? Shall we say that re- 
ligion is unnecessary and that the church can be 
dispensed with and that it makes slight difference 
whether a man believes in Christ or not ? Some 
have said just that, but in this they have greatly 
erred. It is not difficult to account for all the 
goodness which exists outside the Christian church 
if we bear in mind certain facts. First of all, let 
us remember that there is such a thing as heredity. 
Every man is in part the product of the past. 
What he is depends in a measure on what his an- 
cestors have been. Now, wherever in a Christian 
country you find a person with a beautiful face, 
and by a beautiful face I mean a face in which 
there are spiritual lines, and with a life which is fra- 
grant with Christian graces, if you will take up the 
history of that man or woman and trace it back to 
the earlier chapters, you will come sooner or later 
upon a Christian- — a Christian father or mother, or 
grandfather or grandmother, or great grandfather 
or mother, some true saint of God who loved the 
place of prayer and who spoke the name of Jesus 
with reverence and love. This saint held in check 
his impulses, subdued his lawless inclinations, 
bridled his appetites and passions, brought his life 
into beautiful submission to the law of heaven, and 



112 THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 

just as the iniquities of the fathers are visited on 
the children down to the third and fourth genera- 
tions, so also are the virtues and graces, and many 
a man has on him to-day the mark of Christ, al- 
though he takes no interest in the Bible and is never 
seen in the house of God. Of such a man God 
says, " I girded him, although he does not know 
me. 

Moreover, environment is a factor in every hu- 
man life. No man can live isolated or in a vacu- 
um. We are all modified by our surroundings. 
The fiber of our being is in part determined by 
the atmosphere we breathe. It is not necessary for 
a man to read the Bible, to get the Bible, nor to pray 
in order to get some of the effects of prayer, nor to 
go to church in order to receive the aroma of the 
gospel. The church floods the world with light. 
This light falls on the reflecting surfaces of Chris- 
tian institutions, and is thrown into the eyes and 
lives of men who imagine themselves independent 
of Christianity ; it falls on the pages of magazine 
and book and is reflected into the hearts of thou- 
sands who never hear a preacher preach ; it falls on 
every side of our complex civilization as on the 
myriad facets of a gem, and the whole atmosphere 
is so saturated with the glory of the Eternal Son 
of God that every eye is a partaker of that glory 
and every heart illuminated by a light which can- 
not be escaped. 

Suppose that a rose in a foolish moment should 



THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 113 

say: " I will have nothing to do with the sun. I 
do not like him. I will not reverence him. I will 
not even turn my face his way." And so all in a 
pet the little flower turns its face toward the dull 
and unresponsive earth to escape the influences of 
the sun which it is determined to despise. But 
the great sun, sorry that a flower should be so 
foolish, carries on his ministries of love. The air, 
with the warm kisses of the sun upon it, steals 
down under the petals of the rose, wooing them to 
fuller form and brighter color ; the sunlight, falling 
now on this object and now on that, is reflected 
into the downcast countenance of the drooping 
flower; and the industrious sun, the steadfast 
friend of all flowers, both wise and foolish, 
keeps right on pumping water from the sea and 
sends it in gentle showers upon the land, the rain- 
drops trickling down through the sullen earth until 
they find the rootlets of the rosebush, and then 
mount upward through stalk and stem, until in the 
tips of the petals the water becomes the red blood 
of the rose ! And over the rose the great good- 
natured sun keeps saying, " I girded you, although 
you did not know me." 

When a man turns his back upon the Sun of 
Righteousness and says, I will not look at Him nor 
believe in Him, nor pray to Him, nor praise Him, 
will the great Sun cease His shining, will He cut 
off the foolish man and allow him to fade and 
perish ? Not so have we learned of Christ. Our 



114 1HE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 

God is a God who causes His sun to shine on the 
evil as well as on the good ; He sends the rain on 
the just and the unjust also. No matter how deter- 
minedly a man endeavors to escape the power and 
love of Christ, he fails completely in the end. For 
the compassionate Son of God floods the world 
with light, pours all round the man a sea of glory, 
steals into his heart through the love of wife, of 
child, of friend, glides into his soul through picture, 
song, and printed page, and as the man grows in 
the elements of manhood, if he could only hear 
what Christ is saying, he would catch these words : 
" I am girding you, although you do not know 
me ! " Let no man think that because he has 
cast off God therefore God has let him go. He 
works with us and deals with us most wondrously 
even when we are least conscious of His pres- 
ence. 

" Whither shall I go from Thy spirit 
Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence ? 
If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there : 
If I make my bed in hell, behold Thou are there. 
If I take the wings of the morning 
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 
Even there shall Thy hand lead me, 
And Thy right hand shall hold me. 
If I say surely the darkness shall cover me ; 
Even the night shall be light about me. 
Yea, the darkness hideth not from Thee ; 
But the night shineth as the day ; 
The darkness and the light are both alike to Thee." 



THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 115 

We do injustice to the ways of God unless we 
remember that He is our Father, and not only 
our Father, but the Father of all. He is working 
in Christendom and outside of Christendom, in the 
church and outside of it, in Christians and in those 
who are not Christians, in those who pray and in 
those who never pray. We sometimes speak of 
the means of grace, meaning prayer and Bible 
study, the Lord's Supper and church attendance. 
Rather a meager list of means of grace for a God 
so great and a world so needy ! Why not go on 
and name other means of grace : fatherhood, 
motherhood, friendship, literature, art, music, 
business, work, suffering, — all these are channels 
through which the good God comes to men. God 
does not confine His work with human souls to 
Sunday. He works with us straight through every 
day of every week. In every experience He is 
present, endeavoring to enlarge our heart. 

And what He does with us He is doing, so far 
as human wills will let Him, with all men every- 
where. He is a Saviour, and He goes forth to seek 
and to save those who are lost. He does not con- 
fine Himself to church members. He mingles 
with the publicans and sinners. If He were working 
only inside the church, then well might we despair; 
but because He is working everywhere, sovereign 
of all the forces which are or are to be, we can 
hold up our heads in hope, knowing that at last 
every knee shall bow. He goes everywhere, 



Il6 THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 

convincing men of their sins. When a girl takes 
her first step downward her cheeks burn with 
shame. Why ? Because the eyes of Christ are on 
her. It is His gaze which causes the burning in 
the cheek. The cheek would never burn if there 
were no God. The young man who surrenders to 
his lower self feels an awful sense of degradation. 
This is because Christ has condemned him. 

There would be no remorse if there were no 
God. The business man who stoops to do a mean 
or dishonest thing has planted a thorn in his mem- 
ory which pricks him and causes him to bleed. 
This, too, is nothing but the condemnation of the 
Lord. And if God is present in every soul to 
chide and warn and rebuke, so He is present in 
every soul to soothe and cheer and bless. Before 
every man, high and low, rich and poor, saint and 
sinner, Christ is standing, saying : " Behold I stand 
at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice 
and will open the door, I will come in." No one 
makes a right choice without receiving the blessing 
of heaven ; no one takes a step upward without a 
" well done " from the lips of the King. 

Along the avenues and the alleys, in the garrets 
and cellars, in the mansions and slums, the un- 
sleeping God is at work ministering to men and 
relieving them in the midst of their distresses. 
Poor tired women, who do all their work and all 
their sewing, and bear the burdens and anxieties 
which children bring, and who, because of house- 



THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 117 

hold cares, never go to church and never hear an 
anthem and never sing a hymn, are not forsaken 
by Him. They grow in grace, learning patience 
and tenderness and self-sacrifice all the time. They 
may not be familiar with pious phrases, they may 
know little of Isaiah or even of St. John, but God 
is with them, and at the last great day many of 
them will be found at His right hand. A 
poor woman in a miserable tenement, who makes 
a bed in a corner of her shabby room for some 
poor wretched creature poorer than herself, has a 
strange glow in her wearied heart which is nothing 
less than the voice of Christ saying, " My peace be 
unto thee." Such a woman may with surprise say 
in the other world, " When saw I thee ? " 

There is nothing more interesting, I think, in 
the New Testament than its account of people who 
were surprised. The woman at Jacob's well talked 
with Jesus and did not know that she talked with 
the Messiah. He helped her, and her heart burned 
within her before she knew Him. On the morn- 
ing of the resurrection Jesus met Mary, but she did 
not know Him. In the afternoon two sad-hearted 
men walked with Jesus from Jerusalem to Em- 
maus, and though their hearts kindled and glowed 
as He talked, they did not know Him. The blind 
man, blind from his birth, whose eyes Jesus opened, 
did not know Him even when he looked into His 
face. To the question of Jesus, " Dost thou be- 
lieve on the Son of God?" the pathetic answer 



Il8 THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 

came, " Who is He, Lord, that I might believe on 
Him ? " Many a sad-hearted man on his way to 
Emmaus feels his heart burn within him and finds 
life becoming tolerable again who does not realize 
that he is in the presence of the Son of God, and 
many a man whose eyes have been opened to 
spiritual values, and who sees that only the things 
which are invisible and eternal are of worth and 
beauty, does not know the name of Him by whom 
his blindness has been changed to sight. Christ 
girds men constantly who do not know Him. 

Ages ago the sun built up mighty forests on our 
earth, which forests, moldering down, became 
buried deep and were transformed gradually into 
beds of coal. We dig it out and cut it up and 
throw it into the grate, all black and cheerless ; 
it does not look like sunshine. But once kindled, 
its ancient memories are revived, and it burns and 
glows and lights up all the room, exerting a 
witchery over the heart, which causes it to dream 
of sunny days of yore or golden ages yet to come. 
While seated before the blazing grate we do not 
think of the sun ; but the coal fire is nothing but 
sunbeams let out of prison, and if we had ears to 
hear we should hear the old sun saying, " I am 
girding you, although you do not know me." Mrs. 
Browning, in her greatest poem, says that earth 
is crammed with heaven, and that every common 
bush is aflame with God. If that be true of 
bushes, much truer is it of men. Souls are 



THE UNRECOGNIZED GOD 119 

crammed with heaven, and every loving heart is 
afire with God. God has deposited His love in 
human beings, in lover, maiden, wife, mother, 
friend, and their love warms us, thrills us, cheers 
and charms us, lights up with glory this old drab 
world until it glistens like a palace, and lif e becomes 
so supremely blessed we wish we might live here 
forever. We call it human love, forgetting that 
all love comes out of the sky. Had we ears to 
hear, we should hear Christ saying, " I am loving 
you, although you do not know me." 

" We may not climb the heavenly steeps 

To bring the Lord Christ down ; 

In vain we search the lowest deeps, 

For Him no depths can drown. 

" But warm, sweet, tender, even yet 
A present help is He ; 
And faith has yet its Olivet, 
And love its Galilee. 

'•The healing of the seamless dress 
Is by our beds of pain ; 
We touch Him in life's throng and press, 
And we are whole again. 

" O Lord and Master of us all, 
Whatever our name or sign, 
We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call, 
We test our lives by Thine." 



VI 

THE MAN OF THE SEA 



Delivered at the Seventy-third Anniversary of the American 
Seamen's Friend Society, Broadway Tabernacle, New York, 
May 5, 1901. 



122 



VI 

THE MAN OF THE SEA 
"Lord, save me. 1 ' — Matt. xiv. 30. 

It was the cry of a man upon the water. It 
was night. The wind was boisterous and the sea 
was rough. The man was about to be over- 
whelmed. There was deliverance from one quar- 
ter only. It was a cry of mingled hope and 
despair which rose above the moaning of the wind, 
" Lord, save me ! " 

This episode in the life of Peter, described so 
graphically by St. Matthew, is the picture of a 
continuous experience which unfolds itself in the 
spiritual life of the race. The storm described by 
Matthew has long since died away, the voice of the 
man who uttered the cry has long been still, all 
who were then alive have passed into the eternal 
silence, but the experience of that night is not an- 
cient history never to be lived again ; it is a story 
repeated over and over again even unto this pres- 
ent hour. Names and forms are changing always, 
but the spiritual experiences of our humanity run 
on unchanged down the widening generations. 
And so this morning there is still a storm upon the 

123 



124 THE MAN 0F THE SEA 

sea. A man is walking there. The man is in 
danger of being overwhelmed. If we have ears to 
hear, we can hear a cry coming across the water, 
" Lord, save me ! " 

The sea is no longer the little lake of Galilee. 
It is the ocean. The man is not Simon Peter. He 
is the modern sailor. A sailor is a man who walks 
upon the water. When I say walk, I use the word 
in the ordinary Biblical sense. In the Scriptures 
to walk usually means to live. That is the sense 
in which the prophets always used it, and our Lord 
fell into the habit of their speech. " I must walk 
to-day and to-morrow and the day following," 
" He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness 
but shall have the light of life." The apostles all 
spoke as Jesus did. Listen to Paul : " Let us walk 
honestly as in the day," " We walk by faith, not 
sight," " Let us walk in the Spirit," " I beseech 
you that ye walk worthy of the vocation where- 
with ye are called," " See that ye walk circum- 
spectly." And the beloved disciple reminds us that 
we ought to walk even as Jesus walked. " I have 
no greater joy," he said to his converts, " than to 
hear that my children walk in truth." If to walk, 
then, means to live, a sailor walks upon the sea. 
He walks there by the command of God. 

An ever increasing number of men are living on 
the sea. Already the ocean population numbers 
three million souls, a nation as large as the American 
Republic when it first unfurled its flag. And what 



THE MAN OF THE SEA 125 

a curious nation this oceanic nation is. It is a 
nation of men. It is made up of men gathered 
from almost every country under heaven. They 
pass from land to land, from port to port, and have 
no fixed abiding place. Thousands of them have 
no regard for the Supreme Ruler of the world, but 
they are nevertheless servants of His will. They 
are on the ocean by God's commandment. It is 
God's desire that all the nations should come close 
together, that the various races should be depend- 
ent one upon another, that communication be- 
tween the continents should be swift and constant, 
that all good things should be interchanged, and all 
men everywhere should be woven together into a 
vast brotherhood working out in divers forms the 
manifold purposes of heaven. 

These men upon the sea are the servants of the 
Most High. Without them humanity cannot real- 
ize its highest ends. It is they who are draw- 
ing the continents together, and reducing the 
planet to a city in whose markets the products of 
the world are bought and sold. That man upon 
the water is one of the chief characters in modern 
history. Blot him out, let him sink, and you 
change not only the map of the world, but you 
change the texture of its civilization. He is an 
Atlas on whose shoulders Empires and Repub- 
lics are carried. He is the minister of humanity, 
the servant of God. When you build your pedes- 
tals on which to place the statues of the men who 



126 THE MAN OF THE SEA 

have created the modern world, you must not for- 
get to build one for the statue of the man of the sea. 
That man is in danger. It is night upon the 
sea. There are no churches there, no school- 
houses, no art galleries, no splendid bodies of 
scholars or of saints to shine like beacon lights 
making clear the path to heaven. It is midnight 
upon the ocean. The winds are blowing — wild, 
furious, dangerous winds from the caves of de- 
mons, winds that can wreck a soul. The sea is 
rough, and seems to have no pity in it. Teased 
into fury by the storm, it rages like a beast that is 
mad. And this man has only the treacherous sea 
under him and the blast of the wind in his face. 
What is he to do ? God has commanded him to 
walk upon the water. But he cannot do it success- 
fully alone. " Lord, save me!" that is the cry that 
comes up from the man on the sea. I do not say 
that that is the cry which he utters. There is a 
difference between the cry of a man's lips and the 
cry of a man's soul. With his lips he cries for 
what he wants, with his soul he cries for what he 
needs. When Saul of Tarsus reached the western 
edge of Asia he lay down to sleep one night with 
the murmur of the ^Egean Sea in his ears. In his 
sleep he dreamed, and in his dream he saw a man, 
a European, with great hungry eyes looking at 
him. All through the night Paul heard the man 
calling. His constant cry was, " Come over, come 
over, and help us." 



THE MAN OF THE SEA 127 

When the morning dawned, Paul and his com- 
panions crossed to Europe, but they did not find the 
man whom Paul had heard in his dream. They 
stopped at Neapolis, but the man was not there. 
They went on to Philippi, and the man was not 
there. On the Sabbath day they went out of the 
city down to the place of prayer on the bank of 
the river, but the man was not there. Only a hand- 
ful of women heard the first Christian sermon ever 
preached on the continent of Europe. To the end of 
his life Paul never found that Macedonian whose cry 
had disturbed his slumbers. Who then was that 
man ? What was the cry which sounded in Paul's 
ears ? It was not the articulate utterance of any 
particular individual. It was the deep unuttered 
cry of Europe. That man was the soul of the 
great Western world. Paul had brooded over the 
needs of the continent whose representatives had 
come to Jerusalem asking to see Jesus, and when 
he fell asleep the needy soul of that continent 
stood up in the form of a man, pleading as only a 
soul can plead, " Come over, come over, and help 
us." 

And so when I ask you this morning to listen 
for a cry coming in from the sea, "Lord, save 
me ! " I do not mean that any particular sailor is 
calling upon Christ for deliverance. If you should 
go to any particular man and begin to talk to him 
about Jesus he might turn his back on you, or pos- 
sibly curse you. He might snatch from your lips 



128 THE MAN OF THE SEA 

the name of Christ and use it to fill out his blas- 
phemous utterances, but even while his lips kept 
repudiating the Son of God his soul would still cry, 
" Lord, save me ! " It is not the conscious want 
but the unconscious need which pleads trumpet- 
tongued with God and which ought to thunder in 
our ears with tones that will not let us sleep. Not 
what the sailor asks but what he needs; this is 
the cry which God listens to and which I would 
have you hear this morning. 

First, think of the need of the sailor. Think of 
the life he lives. Think of his privations and 
sacrifices. He must practically give up his home. 
The average sailor has no home. What would we 
be without our home ? It is the home atmosphere 
which sweetens us, the home influences which hold 
us, the home voices which call us to true and noble 
living. Lord, save me — that is the only possible 
salvation for a man deprived of his home. But 
the sailor is taken away from the church. For 
months and even for years he may not be able to 
enter the sanctuary. He hears no prayers, no 
spiritual songs, no Bible reading, no sermons. Put 
yourself in his place. Imagine yourself deprived 
of all the public means of grace, not a song or a 
prayer or a sermon, not a word of Christian cheer 
or inspiration for long months, what would you 
be ? Many of us who bathe ourselves in the re- 
deeming atmosphere of God's house every Lord's 
day find it difficult to keep ourselves unspotted 



THE MAN OF THE SEA 129 

from the world. With spiritual songs ringing in 
our ears, with the touch of prayer upon our spirit, 
with exhortations and appeals dropping constantly 
into our heart, we often find ourselves beginning 
to sink. On the land our cry is, Lord, save us ! 
Do you wonder that sailors sink and that so many 
of them go down forever ? We can choose our 
companions. The land is broad and men are many 
and we can generally associate with whom we will. 
But a ship is a tiny world and men are huddled 
together in narrow quarters. A man, even if dis- 
posed to be true and pure, may be obliged to 
live close to those whose mouths are profane 
and whose hearts are unclean. We can hold one 
another up, by prayer and conversation, by co- 
operation in noble work ; but the sailor has none 
of our privileges and scarcely any of our helps. 
" Lord, save me ! " Out of the heavens must 
come the strong hand which delivers. 

Think of his hardships. No other man has 
more. Think of the bed he sleeps in. Think of 
the air he breathes, except when he is on deck. 
Think of the food he eats. Think of the absence 
of not only all the luxuries, but also all the com- 
forts of life. A popular novelist, for many years 
a sailor, has recently asserted that no mechanic in 
England would endure for even a week the priva- 
tion, the monotony, and the actual hardships to 
which men are subjected who live before the 
mast. No wonder the average seaman dies under 



130 THE MAN OF THE SEA 

thirty, and that the average life of service on the 
sea is only twelve years. Dr. Johnson once de- 
scribed a sailor's life as perpetual imprisonment 
with a chance of being drowned. It has become 
a proverb that there is no hell for the sailor. He 
has his hell this side the grave. 

Think of his work ! It is monotonous drudgery. 
Much of it is done in the midst of great danger, 
most of it at great discomfort. Burned by the 
heat in summer, frozen by the blasts in winter, 
beaten and battered by the storms, poor man, he 
is often a complete wreck before he has lived even 
half the allotted threescore years and ten. For 
ten years of my life I preached to sailors once 
every month in a Marine Hospital in Massa- 
chusetts. My congregation was different every 
time, but it always presented the same dilapidated, 
wretched, pathetic appearance. My hearers looked 
as though they had escaped from a great battle. 
Some had broken arms, some broken legs, some 
great gashes in their head, some lacerated and 
mangled faces, some frozen hands and feet. Poor 
battered wretches with the life almost pounded out 
of them, they would hobble into the chapel with 
canes and on crutches, bandaged and tied up and 
plastered over, in order to hear me preach, and 
their rough weather-beaten faces appealed to me 
as no other faces ever have. My heart went out to 
them in their loneliness and distresses, and goes 
out to them still, and to all their fellows on the sea. 



THE MAN OF THE SEA 131 

So great a liking for them grew up in my heart 
that nothing gives me greater pleasure than to be 
permitted to say a word to increase the interest 
of Christian people in what I believe to be almost 
the most neglected of all God's children. 

I do not mean to say they are neglected alto- 
gether. Thanks be unto God, Christian men and 
women in increasing numbers are giving thought 
and love to these men, but for centuries the neg- 
lect was well-nigh universal, and the attention 
they now receive is small compared with what it 
ought to be. It was not till 1812 that in Boston 
the first society ever organized in this world for 
the religious care of seamen was started. It was 
not till 1820 that there was erected on Roosevelt 
Street, in this city, the first Mariners' Church ever 
built. From that day to this the work for seamen 
has been expanding, but they are still among the 
most neglected of all the sons of men. What a 
slight figure they cut in the thought even of those 
of us who are most interested in the world's re- 
demption. How seldom we pray for them, how 
little we do for them. Outside of a little company 
of their faithful friends, who is interested in a 
sailor ? The politician cares nothing for him. If 
a man has a vote, no matter how poor and de- 
graded he may be, he will be looked up in his 
cellar or attic, and at least once every year he will 
be made to feel that he is a man and counts one 
in the great host of American citizens. 



132 THE MAN OF THE SEA 

But a sailor has no vote. The politician pays 
no attention to him. He is ignored in all cam- 
paign literature as though he did not exist. Even 
the philanthropists are too busy with other people 
to give but hasty thought to the men who do busi- 
ness on great waters. They are careful of the 
little children, and of the aged, and of the blind, 
and of the deaf and the dumb, and of the insane, 
and of the imbeciles, and of the criminals and of 
the prisoners, and even of the horses and cats and 
dogs, but the sailor they usually pass by on the 
other side. Religious workers in great armies 
are feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, 
and visiting the sick, and showing hospitality to 
the stranger, but except in rare cases, their thought 
and affection seem to stop when they come to the 
edge of the sea. Indeed, the bulk of Christian 
work stops several blocks this side of the edge of 
the water. Our neglect of the sailor on land is 
more surprising and wicked than our neglect of 
him when he is on the deep. 

A sailor is the inhabitant of two worlds — the 
world of water and the world of land — and we 
neglect him in both worlds. Although he is our 
guest we pay scant attention to him when he 
arrives at our doorstep. He reaches the city in 
the most desolate and degraded sections of it. 
Cities have a strange way of deteriorating as they 
approach the sea. There is usually a congestion 
of poverty and vice in the neighborhood of the 



THE MAN OF THE SEA 133 

wharves. Misery and dissipation build their homes 
near the docks. Hunger and rags, drunkenness 
and lust, profanity and filth, these as a rule seize 
upon the sea border of a city, and the sailor who 
has been, it may be, in a hell on the sea because 
of the cruelty of officers or the brutishness of com- 
panions finds himself at once in the midst of a hell 
on the land. What a dangerous company of men 
and women stand on the shore to greet him on his 
arrival. The saloon keeper, the harlot, the black- 
leg, the land shark, the gambler, the thief are all 
there to take advantage of his credulity and to fan 
into flame his worst passions. Look at him falling 
into the clutches of that band of harpies ! He 
has escaped from the storm of the sea into a more 
furious storm on the land. As you see him pur- 
sued from street to street by that gang of devils 
determined to prey upon him, cannot you hear the 
piercing cry, " Lord, save me ! " 

And the climax of the tragedy lies in the fact 
that all this takes place at our gate. We dress in 
fine linen and fare sumptuously every day, while 
there is a man at our gate, not licked like Lazarus, 
but bitten by dogs. We respectable people crowd 
together in the center of the island, leaving a 
terrible fringe along each river which most of us 
never look into and would not venture to touch. 
Sailors are obliged to land in streets through which 
we are almost afraid to walk. Do you know that 
last year 4343 vessels came into our harbor, and 



134 THE MAN OF THE SEA 

that on board these vessels there were almost 
550,000 men of the sea? Over a half million sea- 
men are our guests every year, and what sort of 
hospitality do we extend them ? When Paul and 
his companions were shipwrecked on the coast of 
Malta, St. Luke says that the people of that 
island showed them no little kindness, for they 
kindled a fire and received them every one, be- 
cause of the rain and because of the cold. 

What the people of Malta did for Paul and his 
fellow-voyagers we, Manhattan islanders, ought to 
do for the seamen who are cast up from day to 
day on our shore. We ought to kindle a fire and 
throw round these half million men the warmth 
and cheer of gracious hospitality. For a sailor 
when he conies ashore is chilled by the damp of 
the sea and what he most of all wants is warmth. 
He comes drenched by the mists, and any man 
who kindles a fire for him, though it be a fire of 
hell, can easily get into his heart. All along the 
edges of our city men and women have kindled 
fires in which the bodies and souls of seamen are 
consumed. The Church of God must put out these 
fires and kindle others which will illumine the mind 
and cheer the heart. We must bound Manhattan 
Island with a belt of holy fire. One of the first 
uses to which St. Paul put the fire which had been 
kindled by the people of Malta was to shake into 
its flames a deadly viper which had seized upon his 
hand. If we had holy fires all along our shores, 



THE MAIST OF THE SEA 135 

our sailor guests could shake into them the viper- 
ous sins which fasten themselves upon their souls. 
We Christians surely ought to come up to the level 
of the heathen of Malta : we ought to kindle a fire. 
God holds us responsible for these men. They 
are sailors ; but they are men. They have minds 
and hearts, hopes, affections, aspirations, and 
dreams. Every one of them is created in the 
image of God, and it is Christ's wish that every 
one of them should be with Him where He is and 
behold His glory. They are our servants. They 
are working for us. They minister to our physi- 
cal and social and commercial life. Our dinner 
is better, our homes are more comfortable, our 
libraries are larger, our merchants are richer, our 
life is sweeter and more complete, because of the 
labors and sacrifices of these toilers of the sea. 
Take out of this city every comfort and luxury, 
every decoration and treasure brought to us by the 
hands of a sailor, and the city would be impover- 
ished and ruined. We are the masters of these 
men, and to us the command has come, " Masters, 
give unto your servants that which is just and 
equal; knowing that ye also have a master in 
heaven." Do we give to the men of the sea that 
which is just and equal ? Have we been interested 
in legislation looking to the safeguarding of their 
rights ? Has it pained us to know what wretched 
accommodations are provided for seamen even in 
these days of floating palaces ? " Just and equal ; " 



136 THE MAN OF THE SEA 

that is the way the commandment runs. What 
will Christ say to the rich church members of our 
day who cross the ocean again and again in ele- 
gance and luxury, without so much as a thought 
for the poor slaves by whose ill-paid labor ocean 
voyages are made possible ? 

They are more than our servants ; they are our 
brethren. We are members of the same family, 
children of the same Father, redeemed by the same 
Elder Brother, created for the same high and vast 
eternity. We are our brother's keeper. We can- 
not shake off our responsibility if we would. We 
are condemned if we pass by a man in need. Every 
man whom we can reach is our neighbor, and God 
brings a half million men into New York harbor 
every year that we may do them good. We may 
say our prayers and sing our songs, here at the 
center of the island, but if we pass by the seamen 
whom God brings daily and lays at our gate, our 
punishment will be as awful as that of Dives in 
flames. 

It is for these reasons that the American Sea- 
men's Friend Society ought to have a large place 
in the hearts of all Christian people. How many 
of us, I wonder, know about it and are interested 
in its work ? Do you all know it was organized 
in 1828, twelve years before the Tabernacle, and 
that in seventy-three years of its career it has belted 
the globe with its influence ? Do you know that 
it aids in the support of chaplains to seamen in 



THE MAN THE SEA 137 

thirty-seven ports at home and abroad, that it has 
assisted in the building of Sailors' Homes in various 
parts of the world, that it founds and fosters port 
societies for the social entertainment and religious 
instruction of seamen, that it looks after sick and 
destitute sailors, and assists in the difficult work of 
securing for them their legal rights ? Have you 
ever seen its Home down in Cherry Street in this 
city, where temperance and religious meetings are 
held straight through the year, and where hun- 
dreds of sailors have found Him whom to know is 
life eternal ? Have you heard of the loan libraries 
which are sent out on American vessels leaving 
this port ? If you have not, you will be surprised 
to know that eleven thousand new libraries have 
been already shipped, and that counting shipments 
and reshipments, an average of two libraries for 
every working day has been sent to sea for forty- 
three years. Such a library costs only twenty dol- 
lars, and it will last for many years. One of the 
purposes of this sermon is to induce at least a 
dozen of you to invest, each one, in a library, that 
the influence of the Tabernacle which is now felt in 
so many lands may also be made manifest on all the 
seas. I cannot conceive of a more profitable invest- 
ment for Christian money in all the wide world. 

The time has come when the whole world is 
paying new attention to the sea. We speak of 
the Old World, meaning Europe, but in reality the 
old world is the ocean. It was made before the 



138 THE MAN OF THE SEA 

land, but it is the last world to be discovered. 
Men have now entered in earnest upon its con- 
quest. They are even making a map of the floor 
of the oceans. Having measured the depth of the 
valleys and the height of the mountains of the 
continents, they are now measuring the mountains 
and valleys of the seas. Only recently a work on 
Oceanography was brought out in England, consist- 
ing of fifty royal octavo volumes, aggregating nearly 
thirty thousand pages. The plant life and the ani- 
mal life of the water is being studied by scores of 
enthusiastic students, and the greatest conquests 
of science in the twentieth century will possibly 
be conquests of the sea. Men are finding strange 
things in the water. The other day some divers 
brought up from the bottom of the Mediterranean 
the fragments of some statues. The world was 
thrilled by the discovery of a few hands of bronze 
and a few marble busts fashioned by Athenian 
sculptors centuries ago. We shall some day make 
another discovery ; we shall bring up not a marble 
man from the ooze of the ocean bottom, but out of 
the darkness of the forecastle we shall bring up 
a man of flesh fashioned by the hands of the Infi- 
nite Artist. If the scholars can afford to give 
time and thought to a bronze hand of a lost statue, 
we Christians can afford to become enthusiastic 
over a sailor's soul. 

John, the beloved disciple, says he saw a mighty 
angel setting his right foot upon the sea. That 



THE MAN OF THE SEA 139 

is what the world just now is doing. It is taking 
possession of the sea. One of our distinguished 
citizens has written a book in which he sets forth 
the influence of sea power in history. It is safe 
to say that its influence in the future will out-match 
its influence in the past. Our Republic is prepar- 
ing to walk upon the sea. God has spread an 
ocean outside our eastern and western windows, 
and on these oceans as well as on the land, this 
nation is to work out its destiny. On the water 
as on the land it must do its duty, and on board 
our ships as well as in our shops and factories 
there must be men true to the laws of righteous- 
ness. What means the creation of our navy, if we 
are not to walk upon the sea ? What means the 
constant effort to expand our merchant marine, if 
God is not leading us to walk in more influential 
ways upon the waters? In one sense there will 
be in the future no more sea. No more sea in the 
sense of mystery, danger, barrier, separation, for 
the ocean shall become more and more a continent 
on which men shall pursue their pleasures and 
carry on their business. An increasing number 
of Americans are destined to walk upon the water. 
It is a fact of vast significance that the civiliza- 
tion of the twentieth century, like the angel in the 
Apocalypse, is putting its right foot upon the sea. 
If we are wise, therefore, we shall look after 
our seamen without delay. Thus far to many of 
us the sailor has been only an outcast and a vaga- 



140 THE MAN OF THE SEA 

bond. He has been the publican of the modern 
world, the man passed as hopeless, to be classed 
with imreclaimable sinners. We have excommu- 
nicated him. We have regarded him as a heathen. 
But the Son of God seized upon the publican of 
Palestine, to the utter consternation of the reli- 
gious leaders, and made him a member of the 
apostolic band. There was a publican in the little 
company upon whose shoulders Jesus rolled the 
work of bringing the world back to God. The 
Christian religion will not allow us to think of any 
class of men as hopelessly degraded or finally ex- 
cluded. Jesus found redemptive forces in the very 
classes which the Jewish church had foolishly cast 
aside. The Christian church must use the sailor. 
More hopeful material the world does not afford. 
The man of the sea is young, and he is schooled 
in the experience of self-sacrifice. Many of us do 
not make good Christians because we are too fas- 
tidious and squeamish. Our life has made us soft 
and fussy. We have had too many cushions, too 
many servants, too much coddling. We lack the 
tone and fiber of genuine Christian soldiers. We 
make a great ado about trifles, and shirk duties 
that are hard. 

But the man of the sea is used to rough knocks. 
Hardship has made him tough and courageous. 
He has the very elements which Christ demands 
in those who serve Him. What stuff these men 
of the sea are made of ! We have not yet forgot- 



THE MAN OF THE SEA 141 

ten how the stokers on the Oregon, when brought 
up half dead from the awful heat of their burning 
prison, as soon as they had partially recovered 
from their fainting condition begged to go back 
to their post again that they might do their part 
in bringing the great battleship on time into Cu- 
ban waters. Nothing was too severe for them to 
bear if only they could serve their country. Give 
men like that a love for Christ and they will 
bring this world to God. Supreme humility, per- 
fect self-denial, unflinching courage, glorious endur- 
ance, reminding one almost of Golgotha — these 
are the very virtues which the church is in need 
of, and all these she will find in beautiful abun- 
dance in the rough, tough-fibered, stout-hearted 
men of the sea. 

Once let a sailor be baptized with the Holy 
Spirit and you have another Simon Peter, a man 
of rock, on whose rugged strength the Christian 
church can build her hopes with no fear of disap- 
pointment. This is the man whom God has ordained 
to be the most efficient of all foreign missionaries. 
His work carries him to many cities and countries 
and gives him the command of many languages, 
and when he has the good news in his heart he 
tells it wherever he goes. This is the very man 
that the church needs to carry on her work. He 
will be the cheapest as well as the most effective 
of all mission workers. He will get his salary 
from the merchants and his eternal reward from the 



142 THE MAN OF THE SEA 

King. Commerce is the servant of the Almighty, 
and the Son of God will use her more and more in 
the upbuilding of the church universal. Com- 
merce by employing Christian seamen will become 
the mightiest of all societies organized for foreign 
missionary work. When every ship that sails the 
sea has on board men baptized into the name of 
Christ, 

"Jesus shall reign where'er the sun 
Does his successive journeys run ; 
His kingdom stretch from shore to shore, 
Till moons shall wax and wane no more." 

Do not forget, then, the men of the sea. Pray 
for them without ceasing. Strengthen the arms 
of those who labor to give them the gospel. 
Never let a year go by without a contribution to 
the treasury of some Seamen's Friend Society. 
Remember that if Christ has ordered you to walk 
upon the land, He has ordered others to walk 
upon the sea. The man upon the sea is your ser- 
vant, your neighbor, your brother. When you 
look down the harbor what do you see ? First of 
all the statue of Liberty enlightening the world. 
But what do you see beyond that ? Can you not 
see the figure of a man outlined against the sky — 
the man of the sea? Listen, and perhaps you 
may hear a cry rolling across the water — " Lord, 
save me ! " To help that man get hold of the 
hand of Christ — that is one of the great works 
which God has given us to do. 



VII 

THE MAN AT BETHESDA 



Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Mis- 
sionary Association, New London, Conn., October 23, 1902. 



144 



VII 

THE MAN AT BETHESDA 

u A certain man was there, which had an infirmity thirty 
and eight years." — John v. 5. 

Thirty-eight years is a long time. It is a long 
time to any man. It is a longer time to a man 
who is sick. And to a sick man who has no 
friends, it is longer still. To the man at the pool 
of Bethesda time had become interminable. All 
days to him were alike : chill and drab and hope- 
less. 

Strange to say, no one had ever seen this man. 
For years he had lain at one of the prominent 
centers of Jerusalem. Men constantly passed the 
spot where he was lying, but no one ever saw him. 
Merchants and traders, vinedressers and shepherds, 
scholars and church officials, the keen-eyed men 
of their day and generation, came and went, but 
not one of them ever saw this man. This was be- 
cause every man was thinking of himself. One 
had bought a piece of ground, another had bought 
five yoke of oxen, another had married a wife, and 
so none of them had time to come to this man's 
assistance. And that is why they could not see 

145 



146 THE MAN AT BETHESDA 

him. We do not readily see a man who is likely 
to stop us when we are in a hurry. He was in- 
visible even to the crowd of invalids in the midst 
of whom he lay. His fellow-sufferers, as they 
hobbled or shuffled by him, did not see him, for 
their eyes were fixed upon the bubbling water 
which was to bring them swift relief. Sickness 
does not always open the heart and refine the 
spirit ; it may close the one and dull the other. 
Invalidism is a soil in which the flowers of paradise 
sometimes grow with marvelous luxuriance and 
celestial bloom, but just as often it is the soil in 
which flourish brambles and briers and all the 
poison weeds of an abnormal selfishness. The 
sick men at Jerusalem had organized their life 
around the principle which lay at the foundation 
of the civilization of their day. Every man for 
himself : that was their motto. And the reason 
why no invalid saw this hopeless cripple was be- 
cause he was at the rear end of the procession. 
Year after year the blind and the halt and the 
withered, like so many priests and Levites, passed 
by on the other side, and no good Samaritan ever 
came. 

It is not a pleasant picture, and yet we ought to 
look at it, for it gives us a bird's-eye view of the 
world which Jesus came to save. To the Hebrews 
God had sent prophets in a long succession, teach- 
ing them the ways of mercy, but the servants, one 
after another, had been killed, and the husband- 



THE MAN AT BETHESDA 147 

men of the vineyard had refused to bring forth 
fruit. The episode at the pool of Bethesda is an 
awful commentary on the moral degradation of the 
Hebrew people. A sick man lies for years within 
the sight of water which he believes will heal him, 
and in all the great and pious city there is not one 
hand reached out for his relief. Day after day, 
week after week, month after month, the sacrifices 
and anthems and prayers of an elaborate worship 
went on in the temple, but not a man in all the 
priesthood seemed to know that there was a brother 
man a few yards away who had something against 
him. While the fire was kept burning on the 
temple altar, the fire of hope in a human heart, 
the divinest fire on earth, was left to flicker feebly 
and at last go out. The man at the end of the 
procession lay in darkness and the shadow of 
death. 

But in the fullness of time on a never-to-be- 
forgotten day, a man comes down to the pool of 
Bethesda who has a genius for seeing men. Run- 
ning His swift glance over the faces of the crowd, 
His eyes rest at last on the wan face of the man 
at the end of the procession. He looks at him, 
He comes toward him, He speaks to him, He asks 
him a question. The man pours out the dismal 
story of his woe, but before the last dark syllable 
has died on the air the man is on his feet — so 
swiftly has infinite mercy come to his relief. 

The story is significant because illustrative of 



148 THE MAN AT BETHESDA 

the disposition and habit of the world's Redeemer. 
What He did at Bethesda He always did, and does, 
and will forever do. How large a part of all His 
public career can be covered by this picture of 
Bethesda ! " The Son of Man is come to seek 
and to save that which was lost." " They that are 
whole have no need of a physician, but they that 
are sick." " I come to call not the righteous, but 
sinners to repentance." So He said and says, and 
will say forever. He began his ministry by hold- 
ing up an ideal sketched by Isaiah's master pen, 
and said to the people who knew Him best: 
" This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears. 
For the spirit of the Lord is upon Me because 
he has anointed Me to minister to the world's 
neglected." Strange to say, this announcement of 
His program stirred up opposition at the very 
start. But He never wavered or turned back. 
He said He would preach the gospel to the poor 
and He did it. The poor were the victims of the 
cruelty and scorn of the rich. He befriended them. 
There were men who were morally and spiritually 
poor who had lost treasure in comparison with which 
a purse is but trash. He was especially kind to 
these. The poorest people in all Palestine were the 
Samaritans. For four hundred years they had been 
ostracized and hated by the Jews. The capital of 
Samaria was called a city of fools. A Samaritan 
was not considered so good as a dog. For many 
generations the Samaritans had been steadily 



THE MAN" AT BETHESDA 149 

ignored. A Samaritan was at the end of the pro- 
cession; and so it was to a Samaritan that the first 
clear disclosure of His Messiahship was made. 
The Samaritan chosen to receive the revelation 
was not a man, but a woman, for a Samaritan 
woman was lower down in the scale than a Samari- 
tan man. She was nothing but a toy or a slave, 
in whose soul the Rabbis had no interest. 

And so Jesus preached His gospel first of all to 
a Samaritan woman. She was not a lady, but a 
jaded, ignorant woman, mentally unfurnished and 
morally bankrupt. She had neither education, nor 
character, nor reputation. Of all the human beings 
who were at that time upon the stage of action, 
this woman was as low as the lowest. To her first 
of all He announced the fact that He was the Mes- 
siah, and to her He explained what kind of worship 
is acceptable to the Eternal. A certain woman 
was there who had an infirmity for a long time, and 
when Jesus saw her He had compassion on her 
and said to her, "Wilt thou be made whole?" 
His heart went out always to the Samaritans. The 
religious teachers of His day were experts in han- 
dling Scripture, but they were blind to the needs of 
men; so one day he told a story in which a man 
naked and half dead is neglected by a priest and a 
Levite and rescued by a Samaritan who chances 
to pass that way. To the complacent and self-satis- 
fied scribe who listens to the story, Jesus says, point- 
ing to the figure of the Samaritan, " Go, do thou 



150 THE MAN AT BETHESDA 

likewise." His tenderness for the Samaritans was 
never forgiven by the Jews. When Jesus at- 
tempted to preach in the streets of Jerusalem 
men hooted at him and stabbed Him with the 
venomous taunt, " You are a Samaritan and have 
a devil ! " 

In Galilee and Judea the men lowest in the 
social scale were Publicans. They were the 
custom-house officers of Palestine. They col- 
lected Jewish money for Caesar's treasury, and 
hence were counted renegades and traitors. Like 
all reputed traitors they were treated with con- 
tumely and scorn. Jesus' heart went out to the 
Publicans. He ate with them in their homes. 
Men in consternation asked His disciples the rea- 
son why their Master ate with Publicans. So un- 
usual a phenomenon demanded instant explanation. 
By and by it became a remark tossed from mouth 
to mouth, " He is a friend of Publicans." 

But the frowns and criticisms of the good people 
of His day never swerved Jesus from His course. 
He was the steadfast friend of the unpopular and 
of all upon whom society refused to smile. One 
day when passing through the city of Jericho, the 
most unpopular man in all the town climbed into 
a tree to see him. He was rich, and he was a 
Publican. Jesus looked up into his face and said, 
"Come down, Zaccheus ; I will dine with you to- 
day." He said it in the hearing of a great crowd. 
He said it, remember, in the priestly city of Jericho, 



THE MAN AT BETHESDA 151 

where social lines were drawn more tightly than 
anywhere else in all Palestine, and where class 
hatred was most venomous, because sanctified by 
the sanction of the professed leaders of religion. 
There were two men in Palestine who were espe- 
cially conspicuous and noteworthy : at the one 
end of society stood the Pharisee, at the other end 
stood the Publican. Jesus pictures both men pray- 
ing in the Temple, and lo ! the Publican goes home 
justified rather than the Pharisee ! Oh, the divine 
audacity of this man ! He erects twelve thrones, 
and on each throne He places a man who shall 
judge one of the twelve tribes of Israel, and when 
the world looked to see who the men were, behold 
one of them was a Publican ! And there the Publi- 
can has sat for nineteen centuries, and there he 
will sit to the end of time, reminding us ever of 
the consoling fact that out of the world's neglected 
and outcast classes can come, and will forever come, 
regenerating forces for the redemption of the race. 
But why need I dwell on these things ? The 
time would fail me if I should tell you of the lepers 
whom He healed, of the blind men to whom He 
gave sight, of the insane men among the tombs to 
whom He gave a sound mind, of the miserable 
outcasts whom He loved back to life again. What 
is the New Testament but a description of Be- 
thesda, the house of mercy, with Jesus at the center 
of it, saying to the most helpless and hopeless of 
all the impotent folk that lie there, " Rise and 



152 THE MAJST AT BETHESDA 

walk " ? The French artist, Tissot, seized upon 
the core of the gospel when he painted the picture 
of Jesus wearing the crown of thorns, sitting on the 
steps of a ruined temple holding His bleeding brow, 
over the shoulders of two poor peasants, who, foot- 
sore and weary, have sat down there in the gloom 
of their great desolation. 

And what He did He told his followers to do : 
" Go to the lost sheep, heal the sick, cleanse the 
lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons; when you 
give a dinner, invite the people overlooked by 
others; if you want to be great, you must be the 
servant of all." When John the Baptist, shut up 
in prison, began to wonder why Jesus did not march 
straight onward and seize the reins of power, and 
sent a messenger, asking, " Art thou He that was 
to come, or shall we look for another ? " Jesus 
sent back in substance this luminous reply : " Tell 
John I have tarried behind at the pool of Bethesda 
with the man who has had an infirmity thirty and 
eight years. I am caring for the people who are 
impotent and discouraged at the end of the pro- 
cession." That was the proof that He came down 
from heaven. To take care of the man for whom 
nobody cares and to give strength to the man who 
has lost courage and hope, God Himself cannot do 
a diviner thing than that! Some great deliverer 
standing at the pool of Bethesda saying to the man 
who is without a friend or a hope, " Rise and walk " 
is the world's ideal Messiah, the one for whom 



THE MAN AT BETH BSD A 153 

weary ages have looked long and waited. " Follow 
Me," "Follow Me," " Follow Me," so He said to all 
who were willing to listen, and when they looked 
up they saw Him going always toward Bethesda. 
The disciple must be like his Master, and the servant 
must obey his Lord. " Why call ye Me Lord if ye do 
not the things which I say ? Ye are My friends if 
ye do whatsoever I command you. I have given 
you an example." 

Knowing that in a little while the world would 
see Him no more, He breathed the ruling ideas of 
His soul into a few simple words, which will shine 
like constellations with steady and saving light on 
the world's dark path forever. The "lost sheep," 
the " lost coin," the " lost son," the half-dead trav- 
eler between Jerusalem and Jericho, the neglected 
beggar at the gate, — are these not the fixed stars 
by which humanity must guide its course? All 
through His life our Lord could not look upon a 
crowd without being moved with compassion for 
them. He loved men from the beginning, He 
loved them to the end. The last day He spent 
in the temple he gave immortality to a poor lonely 
woman who had timidly dropped two bits of cop- 
per into the treasury. He noticed her because she 
was at the end of the procession of all who gave 
gifts. On the cross He threw around the poor 
benighted soldiers, neglected servants of Caesar's 
court, as they drove the nails through His hands, 
the healing folds of a loving prayer. And when 



154 THE MAN AT BETHESDA 

at last He stepped from this world into paradise 
He carried a robber in His arms. " Therefore 
God has highly exalted Him and given Him a 
name which is above every name, that at the name 
of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue 
confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of 
God the Father." 

Why did Jesus show this vast concern for the 
neglected and the apparently worthless ? He saw 
in every man the image of God. Every man to 
Him was a child of God. By birth man belongs 
to the Heavenly Father. In his heart are the pos- 
sibilities of the life eternal. In his soul are wrapped 
up powers which will unfold forever. Believing this 
there was in Jesus' eyes round every man the ro- 
mance of the infinite. There was in every heart 
the mystery of eternity. Every man in the innu- 
merable multitude which have moved across the 
earth from the cradle to the grave, from the age 
of ice to the present hour, no matter what his race, 
his nationality, his color, his rank or social condi- 
tion, has been and is the child of God, created in 
His image, fitted for communion with Him, in- 
trusted with vast responsibilities, the heir of an 
immeasurable destiny. That was the belief of 
Jesus, and if His belief is without foundation then 
the New Testament is robbed of its luster, and 
Golgotha loses its meaning. The foundation truth 
of Christianity is the infinite worth of man. 

This conviction of man's greatness is the key 



THE MAN- AT BETHESDA 155 

which unlocks the mystery of the tragedy of Jesus' 
life. His great quarrel with His nation was that 
His countrymen were inhuman. The inhumanity 
of the so-called best people of His day stirred Him 
to pity and fiery-eyed indignation. The land was 
full of religion, but it lacked the milk of human 
kindness. The scribes and Pharisees had their 
eyes glued on institutions, books, ceremonies. 
They had lost interest in man. To them the 
Sabbath was more than a human being, the tem- 
ple was more than a human body, a sacrifice was 
more than the good-will of a brother man, a con- 
tribution to the temple was more than filial devo- 
tion to one's parents. The good people of His day 
were punctilious in regard to ablutions and fastings 
and prayers, but they had lost the heart that pities. 
" Go learn what this means," He said to the crowd 
of quibblers. " I desire mercy and not sacrifice." 
"You pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, 
and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, 
judgment, mercy and faith." This was His terri- 
ble and crushing arraignment. His entire life was 
spent in picking up men whom the world had 
knocked over and speaking kindly to men who 
had been shoved into a corner, and whispering 
words of hope into the ears of men whom the 
Jewish church had labeled " lost," and who had 
been cast out by public opinion into the outer 
darkness. His one supreme purpose was to induce 
the world to believe first in the fatherhood of God, 



156 THE MAN AT BETHESDA 

and secondly in the sonship of man. There is no 
more pathetic question in the Scriptures than : " Is 
not a man better than a sheep ? " It flashes light 
on the heartlessness of the Jewish church of the 
first century. 

But is not all this elementary ? It most cer- 
tainly is. It is nothing more than the A B C's of 
Christianity. But there is nothing so imperatively 
needed to-day as the remastering of the Christian 
alphabet. We need of all things else a restate- 
ment of the Christian doctrine of man. For the 
materialistic interpretation of life has gone every- 
where, and in many quarters the Christian concep- 
tions are trampled under foot. Many forces have 
conspired to produce confusion, and many a fixed 
star of hope has been dissipated into mist. Within 
the last fifty years the world has gone through a 
revolution greater than any since the days of 
Luther. It is not surprising that men walk con- 
fused and need to reexamine the deep foundations 
on which humanity must forever build. 

Science, by lifting up the heavens and pushing 
out the horizons, has given a new pathos to the 
age-long question : What is man that Thou art 
mindful of him ? Man is so little compared with 
the bulk of the universe, the temptation is to 
reckon him insignificant. Because the worlds are 
so many and the ages are so vast, the incarnation 
has to some become incredible. But with the 
lowering of the dignity of Christ comes inevitably 



THE MAN AT BETHESDA 157 

the lowering of the dignity of us all. If our Elder 
Brother is not what He says He is, then we, His 
younger brethren, are not certain where we stand. 
A humanitarianism that builds on a' Christ less than 
the Son of the Living God is a humanitarianism 
as impotent as the man at Bethesda, and as eva- 
nescent as the morning cloud and the early dew 
which passeth away. 

The creation and expansion of machinery has 
brought about a reconstruction of the entire in- 
dustrial world. Populations gathered from vast 
areas have been massed in great centers, and 
in the roar of machinery the human voice has 
been drowned, and in the processes of production 
the human heart has been forgotten. Do we not 
talk of " hands " ? We are in danger of forgetting 
we are a nation of " souls." 

The principle of competition, owing to the 
breaking down -of national barriers, has gotten 
into a world-wide arena, and is working with an 
intensity and momentum unparalleled and as- 
tounding. Under the principle of competition the 
race is to the swift and the battle is to the strong. 
Men are piling up wealth in comparison with 
which the wealth of Crcesus was a widow's mite, 
while other men, children of the same God, are 
crowded down into the slums, there to welter and 
rot at the bottom of great cities. It was the stars 
which caused David to ask : " What is man that 
Thou art mindful of him?" It is human eyes 



158 THE MAN AT BETHESDA 

peering at us from the doors and windows of 
tall houses in crowded alleys and narrow streets 
which bring from our heart the same pathetic 
and puzzled cry. With the world thundering 
on at its present rate we are in danger of for- 
getting the man at Bethesda. We have forgotten 
him many times already. We forgot him a hun- 
dred years ago. If we had not forgotten him we 
should not now blush over " A Century of Dis- 
honor." We forgot him fifty years ago, and 
because we did forget him it was necessary that 
every drop of blood shed by the lash should be 
paid for by blood drawn by the sword. We for- 
got him only the other day. He was in a mine, and 
we could not see him, and so we hurried on and 
built our civilization on the product of that man's 
labor, never thinking of him or his wife, or of his 
children, even though every one of them is a child 
of God. The other day that man quit working, 
but we paid no attention to his action. He was 
only a Slav, and his bad humor, we thought, 
would quickly subside. But to our surprise he 
persisted in his refusal to work, and little by little 
the pillars of the republic began to tremble. The 
wheels in factories and mills ceased to turn. The 
hands of that Slav were on them. Schoolhouses 
began to close — that Slav had kept them open. 
Sick people in many a humble home began to feel 
the pinch of cold — the Slav had been ministering 
unto them. The poor in great cities began to 



THE MAN AT BETHESDA 159 

moan, and the Chief Magistrate of the republic 
confessed, "The situation is intolerable." That 
unnoticed foreigner, hundreds of feet under ground, 
had by his labor made life comfortable and pleas- 
ant to millions who had never seen him. He had 
called for help repeatedly for many years, but no 
one went to his assistance. By refusing to work 
he compelled the world to look at him. 

Men to-day are computing the cost of the strike. 
They say it has cost the nation a hundred and 
eighty millions of dollars. How much additional 
it has cost in suffering no one knows, but this is 
certain, the strike was worth all it has cost if it 
fixes the eyes of the nation on the men who spend 
their lives in the mines. They are our brethren. 
Christ died for them. They toil for us. If they 
are foreigners and ignorant and depraved and 
dangerous, then their claim upon us is all the 
greater. If the miner is at the rear end of 
the procession, our Lord is by his side. It is 
His prayer that we may be with Him where He 
is and behold His glory. Paul could not have 
been mistaken when he said that if we have not 
the spirit of Christ we are none of His. The 
measure of a man's Christianity is not his attitude 
to the man above him, or to the man on his own 
level, but to the man who is below him. How do 
we feel toward the man who is at the rear end of 
the procession ? That is the test of our devotion 
to Christ. 



160 THE MAN AT BETHESDA 

We are living in a hurried age. There are still 
twelve hours in a day, but what are they among 
so many tasks and pleasures ? A hurried age is 
always in danger of becoming superficial. The 
temptation is to make much of the distinctions 
which lie altogether on the surface. Ours is pre- 
eminently an age of luxury and material splendor. 
Dives cut a large figure in the public eye. It is 
written that a man's life consisteth not in the 
abundance of the things which he possesseth, 
but many people have never read that sentence, 
and many of us who have read it do not believe 
it. Men all around us are pulling down their barns 
and building larger ones, and saying to themselves 
and their wives and children : " Let us eat, drink 
and be merry through all the years." The tragic 
folly of all this does not impress us. We jingle 
our gold in our pockets and say with childish glee, 
"We are the richest nation on the earth," for- 
getting that it is required in stewards that they 
be found faithful. In this age when we are so 
busily engaged in weighing our gold and our 
silver and our copper, our grain and our merchan- 
dise and our fortunes, we need a fresh vision of 
the Man who threw a man into one pan of the 
scales and the world into the other pan, declaring 
that one man outweighs the world. 

We need a fresh vision of Jesus Christ and Him 
crucified. That is a great declaration which St. 
Paul makes in his second letter to the Corinthians, 



THE MAN AT BETHESDA 161 

" Wherefore henceforth we know no man after the 
flesh." Is this the man who saw Stephen die, and 
who traveled all the way to Damascus to crush out 
the religion of the Nazarene ? This is the man, 
and yet not the man, for Paul has become a new 
creature. Old things have passed away and all 
things have become new. He has entered upon a 
new era. He has seen the risen Christ and has 
grasped the significance of His death. Christ 
died for all. That is a great word, " all." It is a 
word which sweeps away distinctions and burns up 
limitations. It has in it something of the wideness 
of God's mercy. It is like the heavens, it bends 
soft and gracious over every head. Christ died 
for all — wherefore we know no man after the 
flesh. " There is neither Jew nor Greek." Race 
distinctions are all abolished. Who is saying this? 
A Hebrew of the Hebrews in whose blood there 
run the inherited prejudices of a thousand years. 
Yes, he says there is neither Jew nor Greek. The 
chasm has been bridged by the death of Jesus. 
" There is neither bond nor free." Social distinc- 
tions are rendered insignificant. Who says this ? 
A Jew. Greece loved the beautiful, but she never 
saw that it was beautiful that all men should be 
brothers. Rome prided herself on her love of 
justice, but she was never fair to the slaves. Saul of 
Tarsus lays one hand on the shoulder of Philemon, 
and the other on the shoulder of Onesimus, and 
says to the master, " Receive your slave as a 



1 62 THE MAN AT BETHESDA 

brother beloved." Christianity begins not by tak- 
ing the manacles from the wrist, but by removing 
the prejudices from the heart. Sooner or later 
the fetters are dissolved in the fervent heat of that 
great word brother. If it be true that God's only 
Son died for all, then all these distinctions with 
which the world is filled are of slight importance. 
Can we say as Christian men and women that 
we know no man after the flesh ? Have we 
allowed the death of Jesus to blot out the distinct- 
ions which estrange ? Race hatred is to-day viru- 
lent and furious on both sides of the sea. Class 
distinctions and class alienations are everywhere in 
evidence, and everywhere they retard the coming 
of the golden age. There is a caste system in 
America almost as deeply intrenched, and proba- 
bly as difficult to annihilate, as the caste system of 
India. Even our churches ofttimes have a ten- 
dency to drive classes further apart, and to keep 
alive antagonisms which ought to die. If there is 
one truth above all others which needs to be ut- 
tered to-day with passionate and reiterated emphasis, 
it is the truth that one is our Master and that we are 
all brethren. To talk about " foreigners " with 
the accent of scorn is wholly unchristian ; to speak 
the word "American" in a tone which casts a 
shadow over the rest of the world is altogether 
pagan; to speak about the "ignorant masses," the 
" unwashed herd," with intonations of contempt is 
to fall into the ditch into which the Pharisees turn- 



THE MAN AT BETHESDA 163 

bled. There is too much ado about badges and 
ranks and distinction, and not enough genuine 
good-will and brotherly love. 

And because we do not believe in the infinite worth 
of man we are harassed by fears and are subject 
to distressing panics. We hear much to-day of 
perils. Some men cry aloud because of the 
" yellow peril," and others shudder at the " black 
peril," while others are affrighted by the "white 
peril." Believe that man is the son of God no 
matter what his race or what the color of his skin, 
and there is no peril which cannot be safely met and 
surely conquered. Whence proceeds the note of 
discouragement which is sounded so frequently in 
these days ? From our lack of faith in man. The 
work is long and arduous, there are many delays 
and many failures. What we do we know not now, 
but we shall know hereafter. But who can faint 
or falter, no matter what the discouragements may 
be, who believes that every man is a child of God, 
redeemed by the blood of God's only Son, and was 
created to walk in the ways of righteousness and 
peace ? 

When men say, what are you going to do with 
the red man ? what do you expect to do with the 
black man ? what are you going to do with the yel- 
low man ? our answer is, we propose to treat him 
like a man. By dealing with him as though he 
were a son of God it will be made clear in God's 
good time what place he is to fill in the processes of 



164 THE MAN AT BETHESDA 

carrying the world onward toward "that far-off di- 
vine event toward which the whole creation moves." 
Christ's faith in man, I think, was more wondrous 
far than His faith in God. How he trusted man ! 
" I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me." 
He was certain that to the appeal of love the race 
of men will certainly respond. He threw His 
words into the air, and said they would never pass 
away, certain that man's hungry heart would catch 
them and treasure them up forever. He rolled 
the world upon the shoulders of twelve weak men, 
expecting them to carry the world to God. He 
said to the man at Bethesda, who was without 
strength and without hope, " Rise, and walk." 

" A certain man was there, which had an infirm- 
ity thirty and eight years." That is not all. If 
that were all, then were the future dark indeed. 
"And Jesus saw him." That is the revelation 
which Christianity has brought us. By the side of 
the man who is infirm there stands the strong Son 
of God. Our salvation lies in remembering that 
He is there. It is fitting to-night that we should 
take the bread and wine in remembrance of Him. 
We need to remember Him as the Good Samaritan, 
the Good Shepherd, the Great Physician, the Friend 
of Sinners, the Saviour, who gives His life a ran- 
som for many, and one who stands at Bethesda 
and says to men, " Rise, and walk." 

I suppose all historians would agree in saying 
that since the discovery of America, the five most 



THE MAN AT BETHESDA 165 

neglected men on the American continent have 
been the red man, the black man, the yellow man, 
the white man among the mountains, and the white 
man amid the snows. These are the men under 
whom the American Missionary Association has 
placed its strong arms, and into whose heart it has 
breathed the spirit of Christ. Other organizations 
have done great things in His Name, but none has 
been truer to His spirit, or imitated more closely the 
method of His work. And if organizations are to 
be judged as men are judged, and if the tests applied 
to individuals can be applied to men when massed 
together, then the time is coming when to this 
society will be addressed the glorious greeting, 
" Come, ye blessed of My Father." For on the last 
great day the white man from the mountains will 
say, " I was an hungred and ye gave me meat" ; the 
man from the snows will say, " I was thirsty, and 
ye gave me drink "; the red man will say, " I was 
naked, and ye clothed me "; the yellow man will 
say, " I was a stranger, and ye took me in " ; the 
black man will say, "I was sick, and ye visited 
me; I was in prison and ye came unto me"; and 
when these voices have died away there will fall 
upon the silence the music of a voice which is 
sovereign, saying, " Inasmuch as ye did it unto 
the least of these My brethren, ye did it unto Me." 



VIII 

THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD 



Sixth Annual Sermon before the New England Society, on 
Forefather's Day, Broadway Tabernacle, New York, Decem- 
ber 17, 1905. 



168 



VIII 

THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD 

" And I saw a great white throne." — Rev. xx. n. 

The apostle is on Patmos, an island in the ^Egean 
Sea. He is an exile, driven from his country and 
his work. He is a prisoner. His cell is ten miles 
long. The roof of it is God's great heaven and the 
walls of it are the waves of the encircling sea. And 
from his prison cell he looks out upon the world. 
There is darkness upon the lands, but in the dark- 
ness here and there he sees a light like the name 
of a candle which a group of the followers of Jesus 
have kindled. And a great wind is blowing. It 
is a terrible world upon which the apostle looks. 
Cruel despotisms and ancient tyrannies lift their 
frightful thrones and still go on writing a story which 
is tragedy. All sorts of evils in divers shapes and 
in many forms of aggression and devastation move 
across the scene, squirming like serpents, devour- 
ing like locusts, crunching and crushing like drag- 
ons, torturing like fiends. Above the level of the sea 
the spirit of rebellion lifts its hideous head like a 
great beast, huge, majestic, mighty, concentrating 
in itself the characteristic features of the brute crea- 

169 



170 THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD 

tion. Sin with flashing crown and scarlet robe, 
bedizened and spangled, moves in the midst of the 
nations leading men captive to her will. It is worth 
noting that evil to the man on Patmos is no pallid 
or puny thing. It is not a petty and impotent an- 
tagonist, but majestic, persuasive, alluring, mighty, 
magnificent, with crown and scepter and royal 
robes, captivating the eye with the glamour of its 
magnificence, and swaying the imagination by the 
exhibition of its power. 

And against this vast and terrible hierarchy of 
evil another kingdom is making war. There is a 
tremendous struggle in the world, immeasurable 
forces are contending for the mastery, and the land 
trembles under the shock of the opposing armies. 
But the apostle is nothing daunted. His eye does 
not quail nor does his heart grow faint. Undis- 
turbed he looks upon the great thrilling picture 
with light upon his face, because over the arena in 
which the age-long war is carried on he sees the 
glory of the great white throne. With this throne 
burning in his eye he looks upon the world with a 
heart undismayed and a soul radiant with hope. 

This vision was not peculiar to the apostle John. 
It was one granted to all of the apostles. It was the 
secret of their overmastering power. We err when 
we suppose that the apostles turned the world 
upside down because they carried in their memory 
the parables and the Sermon on the Mount. The 
words which Jesus spoke were mighty words, but 



THE PURtTAJST VISION OF GOD 171 

not by means of them did the apostles lift empires 
off their hinges and turn the stream of centuries 
into a new channel. The New Testament explicitly 
tells us that after the disciples had listened to the 
teaching of Jesus for three years, drinking in his 
parables, his discourses and his prayers, they were 
still impotent in the face of a world which they 
were sent to conquer. They had seen Jesus as a 
teacher teaching on the hillside and by the sea and 
on the corner of many a street ; they had seen him 
as a great physician healing men in Capernaum and 
Bethsaida, and in the market-places of old Jerusa- 
lem ; they had seen him as a reformer upsetting the 
tables of the money-changers and driving the dese- 
crators of the temple in dismay into the streets ; 
but none of these things were sufficient to brace 
their hearts for the great work intrusted to their 
hands. In spite of all of Jesus' teaching and all of 
Jesus' mighty deeds, the disciples after the death 
of their Master were limp and impotent, helpless 
as children, timid as cowards, hiding behind doors 
that were locked and barred, incapable of sending 
up a shout of triumph or a song of praise. And 
then all at once a change came. They stood 
upon their feet like so many giants of the Lord, 
and began to speak words and to sing songs at 
which the world wondered. What wrought this 
transformation ? A vision of Jesus on the throne ! 
Listen to Simon Peter in that great sermon by 
which he broke the hearts of three thousand men, 



172 THE PURITAM VISION OF GOD 

as he says to them, " He hath shed forth this 
which ye now see and hear ! " The teacher, the 
physician, the reformer has ascended to the throne, 
and from the throne he will henceforth as King 
rule the world. 

It was with this vision flashing before their eyes 
that the apostles went out to convert the nations. 
The wildest storm that ever swept across the lands 
broke in their faces, but nothing could bend or melt 
them. A deacon by the name of Stephen was 
stoned, but even while the stones were crashing 
into his flesh his face bore no marks of agony, but 
rather shone like the face of an angel because he 
caught glimpses of the glory of the throne. James, 
one of the sons of thunder, lays down his head 
upon the executioner's block without a tremor or 
complaint. It had been his supreme ambition to 
be near Jesus on His throne, and when death comes 
he does not fear it but meets it gladly, saying, " I 
shall through death come nearer to the throne ! " 
Saul of Tarsus travels from city to city and from 
country to country, everywhere hated and hounded 
and persecuted. He is imprisoned, he is whipped, 
he is stoned, he is threatened with death, he is 
made the offscouring of all things, a contemptible 
creature upon which men wiped their feet and spit 
their venom, but he never winces or falters, never 
groans or laments, but sings wherever he goes, 
" Now unto the King Eternal, immortal, invisible, 
the only wise God, be honor and glory for ever 



THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD 173 

and ever." It was this vision of the throne that 
inspired Paul in the writing of his letters. He 
breaks into song in the midst of his very severest 
arguments. In his great letter to the Romans in 
which he climbs up one of the most splendid 
ladders of logic which human genius has ever 
framed, he pauses halfway up the ladder, shouting : 
" O, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom 
and the knowledge of God ! how unsearchable are 
his judgments, and his ways past finding out ! For 
of him, and through him, and to him, are all things : 
to whom be glory forever." The strength and 
peace and joy of all of the apostles came from their 
vision of the throne. 

This vision has been given to isolated indi- 
viduals in every land and time, and wherever the 
vision has been granted there has been one more 
name added to the roll of the heroes and the saints. 
Never has the vision come but that it has been 
lighter in the world. It came to a whole group of 
men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
who, next to the apostles, are the mightiest men 
who have ever lived. They were the Burghers of 
the Netherlands, the Huguenots of France, the 
Puritans of England, the Covenanters of Scotland, 
and the founders of New England. These are the 
five tribes of the Israel of God who have molded 
the temper of modern civilization and changed the 
structure of the world. Men may say what they 
will about these men, dwelling on their peculiarities 



174 THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD 

and scoffing at their limitations ; men may caricature 
them, dislike them, denounce them, despise them, 
but this one thing must in all fairness be admitted, 
that no mightier men have ever lived. They were 
mighty in the realm of thought, thinking out ideas 
which burn like fixed stars in the firmament of the 
mental world, by which stars men still direct their 
courses and nations build their institutions. Their 
words were mighty, having hands and feet, and as 
they have traveled down the highways of the cen- 
turies, they have taken hold of everything they have 
met, subduing them to their own lofty temper. 
They were mighty in deed. They laid their hands 
upon the Church, society and the State, and the 
prints of their fingers are on them all. 

We cannot understand the times in which we live, 
interpret the movements and problems of modern 
Christendom, nor appreciate the meaning of our 
flag until we make the acquaintance of this immor- 
tal company of intrepid souls by whose genius the 
world has been recreated. These men were differ- 
ent from the apostles in many points — in language 
and in customs, in race and natural temperament 
and disposition ; they differed from them in many 
an opinion and conviction, but the Puritans and 
the apostles were alike in this, they saw in heaven 
that a throne was set and that one sat upon the 
throne who was the sovereign of this world. 

What kind of God was it that the Puritans and 
the apostles saw ? It is sometimes intimated that 



THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD 175 

the God revealed in the Scriptures is a rather bar- 
baric and degraded being, with savage propensities 
and limitations which make it impossible that he 
should be reverenced or loved by thinking men. I 
do not so read the Scriptures. To the men who 
wrote the Bible God was so glorious in his attributes 
and so exalted in his character that it was impossi- 
ble for human pen to describe him. Moses tried to 
do it, and his language quivered, gasped, and then 
broke down completely. Isaiah tried to do it, but 
his pen refused to write. He noticed that even the 
seraphim were hiding their faces, not daring to look 
upon the eternal glory, and the prophet falling 
on his face cried in distress, " Woe is me ! I am 
undone, for mine eyes have seen the King." Job 
tried to do it, but he also failed. He attempts to 
enumerate God's works, but scarcely has he begun 
when he ceases, saying, " These are but a part of 
His ways." We leave Job where we left Isaiah, 
prostrate on his face saying, " I abhor myself ! " 

The only man in the Scriptures who makes a sus- 
tained effort at describing the Eternal is the pris- 
oner on Patmos. And he also fails. He begins by 
comparing the King to the most precious stones 
that the earth affords, but feeling how inadequate 
this is, he says, I will not attempt to tell you what he 
looks like ; let me describe to you the surroundings 
in the midst of which he lives. The four-and-twenty 
elders, representatives of redeemed humanity, take 
their crowns of gold and cast them at his feet ; 



176 THE PURITAN" VISION OF GOD 

and the four great beasts, representatives of the ani- 
mal creation, they also fall down before him, render- 
ing to him their homage and their praise ; and out- 
side the beasts there rise rank above rank the angels, 
and all these, ten thousand times ten thousand and 
thousands of thousands break out in praiseful song ; 
and out of the great heart of the universe there 
comes up a voice saying, " Blessing, and honor, and 
glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the 
throne, and unto the Lamb, for ever and ever." The 
God of the Scriptures is so infinitely glorious that 
he cannot be described. John's effort to describe 
him is laudable and earnest, but his language is 
very difficult to read. We who try to read it are 
perplexed and baffled by it, not knowing exactly 
what he is trying to do. He makes havoc of gram- 
mar and rhetoric, hurling his words into magnificent 
chaos in his herculean effort to paint the face of the 
King. He takes every noun that has color in it, 
and every adjective that has luster, and every verb 
that has music, and every figure that has a wealth 
of suggestion, and every image that has in it the 
power to find the blood, and every verbal gem cre- 
ated by the genius of scholar and orator and poet, 
and all these he weaves into sentences which corus- 
cate and flash and blaze until we are dazzled and 
bewildered by the unparalleled splendor and turn 
away our eyes fatigued and overwhelmed. The 
genius of human speech in the Book of the Reve- 
lation simply falls down in a swoon completely 



THE PURITAJV VISION OF GOD 177 

exhausted by its' effort to hint at the indescribable 
glory of Him who sits on the throne. 

And that was the God whom the Puritans also 
saw. It is interesting to see how the great Puritan 
writers pile up their words in their efforts to picture 
their idea of the Eternal. " What is God ? " they 
used to say, and their answer was, " God is a spirit, 
infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, 
wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and 
truth." The Puritan, like Job, threw himself on 
the ground saying : " I abhor myself. I have seen 
him, therefore I abhor myself." Like Isaiah he 
cried : " Woe is me ! I am undone, for mine eyes 
have seen the King." Like John he fell at Christ's 
feet as one dead. 

But the King, although infinitely glorious, was a 
God who spoke to men. " Out of the throne there 
came a voice." God is a revealing God. He cares 
enough for man to speak to him. He speaks to him 
in a voice that is intelligible. Man can understand 
him if he will. This conception of the Eternal is 
never departed from from the first chapter of the 
Scriptures to the last. God is everywhere a speaking 
God. In the Garden of Eden he spoke to man. He 
spoke to Noah, Enoch, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, 
Moses, David, Elijah, Jeremiah, and all the prophets. 
Jesus Christ is the complete word that comes out of 
the infinite heart. It was this speaking God whom 
the Puritans also saw. "Thus saith the Lord," 
they cried as they went out to subdue the world. 



178 THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD 

God speaks, he speaks to you, he speaks to every 
one. You must therefore prepare yourself to listen. 
You must train your mind that you may interpret 
his message. His message is recorded in the Scrip- 
tures, and that message you must read and under- 
stand and profit by. No priest or king shall read it 
for you. You must read it for yourself. Therefore 
you must be educated. It was the conception of the 
speaking God that built Harvard College and Yale 
College and all the other Puritan colleges of the 
world. Every one of our Puritan schools is built 
on the Puritan vision of the Eternal. 

The God who sits upon the throne is the sover- 
eign of the world. His sway is absolute, his 
dominion has no end. He is the sovereign judge. 
He holds man accountable for his deeds. To him 
every soul must give account. " He will judge 
every one of you after his ways." " The soul that 
sinneth it shall die." "We must all stand before 
the judgment seat of Christ, and render an account 
of the deeds done in the body." " And I saw the 
dead, great and small, stand before God." That 
was the vision by which Hebrew thought was 
always haunted. And that was the vision which 
haunted the Puritan through all his days. " Draw 
the curtains and leave me alone," said old John 
Cotton on his death-bed, on the last day of his 
earthly life. " Draw the curtains and leave me 
alone. I would speak for a while to the King ! " 

The outcome of this vision, it is not necessary for- 



THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD 179 

us to-night to consider. You know what it was in 
apostolic history, and you know what it has been 
in the history of the Puritan world. From this 
vision there came a courage which has never been 
surpassed. The Puritans had in them the intrepid 
temper of Drake and Frobisher and the other sea 
kings of the sixteenth century, and did not hesitate 
to cut the cables and push their ships out upon 
seas whose bounds had not yet been determined. 
They were not afraid to trample down precedents 
when precedents were wrong, and burn up customs 
however ancient if those customs had proved de- 
structive to the soul. There was no enemy however 
terrible whom they hesitated to fight, there was no 
suffering however fearful from which they shrank. 
As the historian Froude says in one of his essays, 
" They were the only men who in that great age 
stood up and fought," the only men who dared to 
strike at the Duke of Alva and resist the tyranny 
of Philip. When men told William the Silent that 
his cause was hopeless and tried to induce him to 
give up, his reply was, " When I took in hand to 
defend these oppressed Christians I made an alli- 
ance with the mightiest of all potentates — the God 
of Hosts — who is able to save us if he choose." 
" It is not with us," said one of the founders of 
New England, " as it is with those whom small 
things can discourage." The Puritan was heroism 
incarnate. And along with this splendid courage 
there was a magnificent hatred of shams and lies. 



ISO THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD 

The Puritans hated mendacity, despised all con- 
tradictions to duty and to truth. They saw that 
the throne was white. Because the throne of the 
Pope was black they hurled their thunderbolts 
against it. Religion in their day had become an 
elaborate and embroidered lie, and so they trampled 
it beneath their indignant feet. They took off 
the head of a king because he was a liar. And 
along with this hatred of hypocrisy and falsehood 
there was a fidelity to duty which never wavered 
and never failed. The Puritan conscience became 
a new factor in the progress of the world. The 
initial note of the new age was struck in Martin 
Luther's answer to the officials of the Roman 
church who demanded that he recant. " I can 
do naught else. Here stand I. God help me. 
Amen." A new age dawned when those words 
were spoken. That was the temper of the Puritan 
everywhere. 

Listen to John Knox on his trial for treason 
saying, " I am demanded of conscience to speak 
the truth ; and therefore the truth I speak, im- 
pugn it who so list." They have inscribed those 
words around the frieze of one of the rooms in 
the old house in Edinburgh in which the Scotch 
reformer lived. And along with this fidelity to 
duty there came a steadfast and unquenchable 
hope. Like the old Hebrew prophets the Puritans 
could never be beaten down. In the darkest night, 
amid the wildest discords, when the storm was at 



THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD 181 

its highest they still kept saying to themselves, 
" Sometime, somewhere, somehow, His kingdom 
shall come, and His name shall be glorious through- 
out the world ! " 

Is not this the vision which we need ? We are 
living in confused and troubled times, when the 
winds are blowing a hurricane across the lands 
and the currents are sweeping us onward toward 
what we do not know. Sin still wears' her scarlet 
and lifts her scepter, and evil in a thousand forms 
devastates the peoples of the earth. Many a fixed 
star has been dissipated to mist, and many a 
hope in these recent days has gone out. In 
current literature and in the conversation of the 
aged I detect now and then a tone of weariness 
and despondency, sometimes sinking into a sigh 
of hopelessness and despair. Many men have 
lost hope in their city and in our republic and in 
the world. Would that we might have a fresh 
vision of the throne ! And if the prisoner on 
Patmos could speak to us to-night, he would say : 
" Look up ! Look up ! " But how difficult it is to 
look up. You remember John Bunyan's man with 
the rake. His eyes are fixed upon the ground, for 
he is raking up sticks and straws, while over his 
head hangs a golden crown which he never sees. 
It was hard for men in the sixteenth 'century to 
look up when they were raking sticks and straws ; 
immeasurably more difficult is it now when men are 
raking together diamond dust and bars of gold. 



1 82 THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD 

Furthermore, the prisoner on Patmos would say to 
us : " Listen, God is speaking to you. Hear what 
he says ! " Not a little of the mischief of our age 
has been caused by the growth of what is known 
as Agnosticism — a long and high-sounding word 
for unbelief. 

It may be doubted whether there have ever been 
any genuine atheists on the earth, men who have 
denied the existence of Deity altogether. Even 
Lucretius, the Roman poet, believed in a Deity who 
was far removed from all that goes on in the world, 
hidden somewhere in the inexhaustible depths of 
space. The human mind in every age has felt that 
there must be something, be it law or force or 
principle or energy or fate or destiny or mind, by 
which the universe came into being, and according 
to which it moves. But all men are practically 
atheists who deny that God can speak, and that 
he does speak to the human heart. To say that one 
does not know whether God speaks or not is to cut 
away the ground upon which the world's strongest 
characters have been built. " Out of the throne," 
says John, "there comes a voice. Listen to it." 
And if you listen you will hear it telling you to pray. 

There is divine wisdom in the poet's lines : — 

" Speak to Him thou for He hears, and 
Spirit with Spirit can meet — 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer 
Than hands and feet." 

" Look up, listen, work." Work while it is day, 
for the night is coming when no man can work. 



THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD 183 

Work, for we shall all stand before the judgment 
seat of Christ. Work, in order that at the end of 
the day you may hear the King saying, " Well done, 
good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of thy 
Lord." 

What is the best gift which one can give to this 
world ? What was the gift which the ancient He- 
brew people gave to humanity ? It is surprising 
how many things there are which it did not give. 
It never carved a statue which the world cared to 
preserve, nor painted a picture which the world 
cared to look at, nor wrote a piece of music which 
the world cared to hear, nor constructed a philos- 
ophy which the world cared to investigate, nor 
worked out a scheme of metaphysics which the 
world cared to follow. Palestine never produced a 
Phidias or a Plato, or a Raphael or a Caesar ; all 
that she gave the world was an impulse Godward, 
and because she gave the world this, therefore 
God has given Palestine a name which is above 
every name, so that at the mention of this name 
human lips everywhere repeat with reverence and 
love — "the Holy Land." 

And what did the Puritans give to the world ? 
Certainly not pictures, nor statues, nor philosophy, 
nor metaphysics. They were not artists or scientists 
or architects or sages ; they were nothing but heroes 
who gave the world a new impulse toward God. In 
many ways they are behind us, in delicacies, 
luxuries, skill, scientific knowledge ; and yet with 



1 84 THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD 

all our ocean liners and our palace cars we feel in 
our highest hours that these men are still ahead of 
us. They are ahead of us because they are nearer 
to the throne. In many points they are below us. 
We have climbed high since the days in which they 
lived. We can look down upon them in knowledge, 
in experience, in achievement. Even our High 
School girls could tell John Milton a thousand 
things which Milton never knew. And yet some- 
how in our better hours we feel that these men are 
above us and their voices come down to us from 
some Alpine height, musical and sweet, freighted 
with a message which makes us think of the song 
of the angels that fell long ago upon the December 
air in old Judea. With all our knowledge and 
acumen and attainments and accumulations we 
stand abashed before these men, acknowledging 
that they are indeed above us, and all because the 
radiance of the throne is on their foreheads. 

This then is the greatest work which any man can 
do, which any set or society of men can do, which 
any state or any church can do ; it is to blow the 
dust off the ideal, to pick up the lowered standards 
and lift them higher, to unveil the face of virtue 
that men may see her in her loveliness, to adorn the 
doctrine of the blessed God, to sound a note of 
warning that men shall not take the downward 
path, but turn their faces toward the throne. 

If we should ask ourselves what our Puritan fore- 
fathers would say to us if they could speak to us 



THE PURITAN VISION OF GOD 185 

to-night, no doubt they would say very simple and 
elementary things like this : " Better die than live 
ignobly — better be poor through life than be dis- 
honest — better fail with honor than succeed by 
means that are unworthy of a man — better leave 
your boys nothing but an unspotted name than 
leave them a colossal fortune with a name that has 
been tarnished. " There is no tragedy on earth so ter- 
rible as the fading of the luster of an honored name. 
There is no spectacle so heart-breaking as the 
spectacle of laurel withered brows that have worn 
it nobly until their hair is gray. There lies upon 
this island one of the highest heaps of gold ever 
amassed by the genius and ingenuity and industry 
of man. That mass of gold can be an Aaron's 
rod by means of which miracles shall be wrought 
for humanity, it may if wrongly used be a mill- 
stone and drown us in the depths of the sea. Let 
us keep repeating to ourselves the words of Jesus, 
"Ye cannot serve God and mammon." Let us 
ponder the meaning of the sentence, " What shall 
it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world 
and lose his soul ? " And how in a world like this 
shall a man keep from losing his soul ? Simply 
by living always within sight of the great white 
throne ! 



IX 

CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 



Address before the National Council, Portland, Maine, 
October 17, 1901. 



188 



IX 

CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 

When the Man of Galilee declared that the first 
and great commandment is, " Thou shalt love the 
Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and 
mind and strength," He claimed the whole man for 
God. He left no outlying districts to become 
tributary to an inferior potentate, no powers to 
prostrate themselves before a rival master. The 
Bible everywhere and always, in its visions of the 
sons of men, sees them falling down before One 
whose right it is to reign, and casting their crowns 
before his throne. " Bless the Lord, O my soul, 
and all that is within me bless his holy name," — 
that is the utterance of every man who has found 
the secret of peace. 

If it be true, as the Scriptures say, that the 
church is Christ's body and his bride, the medium of 
revelation both to men and angels, the organ 
through which the Lord God Almighty speaks to 
His created universe, it follows that the church has 
a claim on us which cannot be denied except at 
our peril, and presents to us a sphere in which our 
energies may find amplest scope for their greatest 

189 



190 CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 

achievements. The doctrine most neglected in 
our churches to-day is Paul's doctrine of the 
Christian church. Paul could not think about the 
church without passion heat; he could not write 
about it without bankrupting language in his effort 
to express what his soul saw. His heart bled 
whenever he thought of the time when he had 
made war on the church. Again and again he got 
down into the dust and said, " I am not meet to 
be called an apostle, because I persecuted the 
church." There is the heat of a blast furnace in 
the question which he hurls at the obstreperous 
Corinthians, — " Despise you the church of God ? " 
The church in his day was marred and stained and 
feeble, but over its diminished head he saw in 
vision the majestic beauty of a glorious church 
without spot or wrinkle, or any such thing, holy 
and without blemish. To the preachers of his day 
he said, in a tone which even now thrills the 
blood : " Feed the church of God, which he has 
purchased with his own blood. It is the church 
of the living God, the pillar and ground of the 
truth.' ' In the profoundest of all his letters, and 
the greatest of them all, his subject is the church. 
Soaring above the local and the transitory, leaving 
all complications, entanglements, and blunders far 
behind him, he beholds the mission of the church 
in the vast and unfolding plan of God. By this 
vision he is humbled, thrilled, exalted. " Unto 
me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this 



CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 191 

grace given, that I should preach among the 
Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ ; to the 
intent that now unto the principalities and powers 
in heavenly places might be known through the 
church the manifold wisdom of God." 

It is only by approaching the church from above 
that we shall find ourselves in a mood attuned to 
the discussion of this hour. Approach the church 
from below, and without the light of revelation 
falling on it, what is it ? Nothing more than what 
many a philosopher and Christian writer has made 
it out to be, — a religious club, a pious coterie, a 
school of ethics, a spiritual police force, a philan- 
thropic center, a benevolent society, one out of a 
hundred organizations, all of them necessary and 
all of them doing good. But the church is doomed 
the day she permits herself to be classed with 
other organizations. In this respect she is like 
her Lord. Make Jesus of Nazareth only one of the 
world's teachers and martyrs, and you have taken 
away the world's Redeemer. It is only when he is 
lifted up above the mightiest of the holy, and 
holiest of the mighty, that he draws all men unto 
him. It is only when the church stands out as the 
body and bride of God's only Son that men are 
willing to bring into her the glory and the honor 
of every province of our wide extended human life. 

It is the open scandal of Christendom that when 
the church gets a man to-day she gets only a 
fraction of him. The man who throws his entire 



192 CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 

self into the church is one man picked out of ten 
thousand. Men speak of coming into the church. 
As a rule, they do not come in. They send in their 
names. But what is in a name in the task of 
redeeming society, in the work of revealing the 
manifold wisdom of God ? Others send in their 
money along with their names, but gold, unless 
accompanied with heart and mind and strength, can 
never unlock the doors of unbelief or usher in new 
Pentecosts. Some bring in their body, but set 
their mind to work in other fields. But there 
is nothing great in the world but man, and there 
is nothing great in man but mind, and if a man 
does not consecrate his mind to the service of the 
church his membership is a tree with nothing but 
leaves. What does the church of God need so 
much to-day as brain ? From the smallest church 
in the country hamlet to the largest city church, 
things are not being done as they ought to be done, 
because men do not give to church administra- 
tion the attention which it needs. 

Oh, for larger areas of consecrated gray matter 
of the brain ! Miracles are being wrought every- 
where, in the world of industry, commerce, art, 
because a magician of wondrous powers — the 
human mind — is energetically at work. Why is 
it that the church stands paralyzed and embarrassed 
in the midst of a generation endowed with the 
power of doing mighty works ? It is because the 
brain power of Christian men is largely drawn 



CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 193 

away from church administration and used in 
lifting commercial empires off their hinges and 
turning the streams of industrial energy into new- 
channels. Men do not, as a rule, come into the 
church bringing their heart with them. They put 
their treasure into the club, the lodge, the grange, 
the fraternity, the labor union ; and where their 
treasure is, there is their heart also. The most 
difficult hymn in the hymn-book for a modern con- 
gregation to sing is : 

" I love Thy Kingdom, Lord ! 
The house of Thine abode, 
The church our blest Redeemer saved 
With His own precious blood. 

" I love Thy church, O God ! 
Her walls before Thee stand, 
Dear as the apple of Thine eye, 
And graven on Thy hand. 

" For her my tears shall fall, 
For her my prayers ascend ; 
To her my cares and toils be given, 
Till toils and cares shall end." 

Men bring their conscience into the church, and 
some of them leave it there. They put it away 
with their hymn-book and Bible, and go without 
a conscience through the week. The dual life 
which thousands of Christian men are living is one 
of the most curious and alarming phenomena of 
modern history. Church members are Christians 
at home and in the church, but in appalling num- 



194 CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 

bers they are pagans and worse in politics and 
business. Their heart is like Palestine in the early 
days of the conquest. An isolated hill-top here 
and there has been captured for the Lord of Right- 
eousness, but the mountains are filled with uncon- 
quered tribes of thought and feeling which still 
dominate the life and action of the land. If you 
ask the cause of this slack allegiance to the church, 
may we not find it in the decadence of Calvinism 
as a ruling power in modern life ? 

The philosophy of Calvin has long since been 
discarded by men who see the morning, and much 
of his theology is abhorrent to the modern mind. 
But in throwing away his errors, and shaking our- 
selves loose from his false conceptions, we have 
lost our grip on the one idea which gave Calvinism 
its vitality, and made it the power of God unto sal- 
vation to nations that had lost their way. Calvin- 
ism knew only two beings — God and the soul. 
With magnificent audacity it swept away the 
priests and the popes, the saints and the angels, 
and left the soul standing face to face with its 
Creator. The old interpretations and traditions, 
speculations and philosophies, which had accumu- 
lated around the faith once delivered to the saints 
until it became mysterious and complicated and 
unintelligible to the plain people, were burned up 
in the unquenchable fires of men who, like Isaiah, 
saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted 
up. " Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of Hosts ! " 



CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 195 

That was the strain which Calvinism heard, and 
the response it gave to the heavenly anthem was, 
"Woe is me!" The sovereign holiness of God 
and the awful sinfulness of man, — these form the 
massive buttresses from which Calvin swung his 
mighty arch. In the sixteenth century, as in 
Isaiah's day, the lips which cried "Woe is me!" 
were touched by a live coal from off the altar, and 
the ears that had been thrilled by the heavenly 
anthem heard a voice saying, " Thine iniquity is 
taken away, and thy sin is purged." 

The universe in the grip of a holy God, the im- 
mortal soul directly accountable to him forever — 
that is the heart of Calvinism. In the power of 
that transfiguring faith men went forth to write 
new chapters in the history of progress. Calvinism 
placed a crown on the head of the individual man. 
The old Teutonic reverence for the individual 
came to its coronation in the theology of a French- 
man. Man owes everything to God. In fiction 
the idea worked itself out into the immortal alle- 
gory of John Bunyan. In poetry it embodied it- 
self in the epic of John Milton. In politics it 
became incarnate in Oliver Cromwell. Never till 
the breath of Calvinism was on men's faces did an 
Englishman of plebeian blood dare to take off the 
head of a tyrant king. In the realm of religion it 
led to commotions and revolutions. There were 
wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood 
and fire and pillars of smoke. The sun was turned 



196 CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 

into darkness and the moon into blood, and men 
calling on the name of the Lord were delivered 
from despotisms which had held them a thousand 
years. 

Englishmen, fired with the belief that every 
man of them was a son of God, answerable to God 
alone, picked up the Bible, and with it as with a 
battle-ax began to hack and hew the prerogatives 
of those who had lorded it over them in the church. 
The miters were torn from the bishops' heads, and 
when good Queen Bess and bad King James used 
their power to oppress Christ's freemen, these men 
resisted unto death. Like Moses, they endured 
as seeing Him who is invisible. They had trial of 
cruel mockings and scourgings; yea, of bonds and 
imprisonment. They were destitute, afflicted, tor- 
mented. Some of them remained in England to 
become the leaven of the British empire; others 
crossed the sea to lay upon the Atlantic coast the 
deep foundations of a new republic. The men 
who made New England what she is stood each 
man alone in the presence of the Eternal. 

In traveling along New England roads one is 
struck by the fact that the old farm-houses are not 
located as they would be located by the men who 
build houses nowadays. The early settlers of 
New England do not seem to have cared for scen- 
ery. Not infrequently the big barn was placed in 
front of the house, across the road, cutting off a 
scene of surpassing loveliness. These men cared 



CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 197 

little for the beauty of hill and vale, of grove and 
mountain. They looked out upon eternity. They 
saw the Lord high and lifted up, and in his pres- 
ence they kept on saying, " Bless the Lord, O my 
soul, and all that is within me bless his holy name." 
Even the faces of loved ones were not so beautiful 
to them as was the face of Him whom having not 
seen they loved. " Leave me alone," said John 
Cotton to his attendant, as he started down into 
the valley of the great shadow. The curtains 
were drawn about the bed, his wife and children 
retired from the room, and alone the greatest of 
New England's early preachers met his God. 
Whatever is excellent and permanent in the struc- 
ture of our national life came from the Puritan 
attitude and temper. 

But in our day we are in danger of losing sight 
of the individual. Years ago Tennyson said, " The 
individual withers," and he has been withering 
more and more. Amiel was right when he wrote 
in his journal: "The two tendencies of our epoch 
are materialism and socialism, each of them ignor- 
ing the true value of the human personality — the 
one drawing it down into the totality of nature ; 
the other drawing it down into the totality of 
society." In whatever direction we look we see 
the individual slipping out of sight. He is disap- 
pearing in journalism. There was a time when 
men like Horace Greeley and the elder Bennett 
stood out as leaders of public opinion, stamping 



198 CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 

the impress of their personality on all who read 
their papers. From many papers the editorials 
have vanished altogether ; in others they are ab- 
breviated and impotent. Tabloid journalism, says 
London's leading newspaper man, is to be the 
journalism of the future. In other words, men 
are not to look to the press for guidance in 
thought and action, but simply for news rolled 
into pellets which may be swallowed quickly by 
men while on their way to business. 

The same forces are at work in the world of 
politics. In the olden times, men like Hamilton 
and Jefferson and Webster and Clay stood before 
the nation, and gave utterance to ideas which 
thrilled the hearts and shaped the legislation of a 
continent. Congress now does its most important 
work in committee rooms, and the measures at 
last decided on are the resultant of innumerable 
forces which it is difficult to analyze and impossible 
to trace. The industrial world makes war on the 
individual. It is not by chance that we speak of 
the masses. Our speech betrayeth us. It proves 
we are losing sight of the individual. The word 
"masses" is a product of our machinery, and 
machinery has a tendency to reduce immortal 
souls to bits of mechanism. 

Go through any large manufacturing establish- 
ment, and what do you see ? Wheels, pistons, 
cylinders, beams, belts, with here and there a 
human being stationed, that by hand or foot he 



CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 199 

may supplement the effort of the gigantic monster 
which thunders and roars in its eagerness to turn 
out a product which the world is waiting to use. 
We do not say, " What a piece of work is man ! 
How noble in reason ! How infinite in faculty ! " 
for he is only a little cog in one of the wheels. We 
think of the machinery, of the miracles of pro- 
duction, of the way in which America is leading 
the world ! The world of commerce is also at war 
with the individual. Men dare not stand any- 
where isolated and independent. To accomplish 
their designs they go into corporations, and there 
the individual vanishes from public view. Corpo- 
rations do dishonest and cruel deeds, but who is 
responsible we cannot say. We cannot get our 
hand upon the culprit because he eludes our eye. 
These corporations have recently manifested a 
genius for combining. One corporation swallows 
up another, and then another and still another, 
until at last it meets a corporation as large as it- 
self, and the two combine to form a trust. Like 
huge monsters of prehistoric times these trusts 
move slowly across the modern world, exciting the 
consternation of many and the wonder of all. 

The same influences are at work in the church. 
The church can never shut her windows so tightly 
as to keep out the atmosphere of the age. No 
matter what she says or does she cannot escape 
the tug of forces which dominate the world around 
her. This is the day of organizations. We have 



200 CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 

our leagues, unions, boards, societies of a hundred 
types and names. Individuals slip into these as 
into bottomless pits, and are never heard from 
again. When the world says, How many thou- 
sands of Christians have you ? we are ready with 
our answer. When it says, What have you done ? 
we are embarrassed. 

We have all the regularity and precision and 
everlasting movement of machinery, but we lack 
the one thing essential, the warmth and moving 
power of personal affection. There is a conspiracy 
on foot to wipe out the individual man. There is 
a tidal movement toward the city, and city life 
makes ceaseless war on personality. Men are lost 
when they go into the city, as rivulets and rivers 
are lost when they reach the sea. What is a city 
but an ocean swept and tossed by the winds that 
blow from the caves of passion, pride, and greed ? 
Men who are strong and who stand erect in village 
life disintegrate and disappear under the strain 
which city life lays on them. " What is man that 
thou art mindful of him ? " The question was 
first asked under the Syrian stars. The question 
has a new pathos when it is suggested by the 
massed and feverish population of a great city. 

How shall we save the individual ? We wrestle 
not against flesh and blood, but against principal- 
ities and powers and against the forces which 
modern civilization has created. The world of 
industry by its machinery, the world of commerce 



CONSECRATED PERSOJVAL/TY 20 1 

by its combinations, the world of politics by its 
enthronement of majorities, the world of society by 
its cities, the world of thought by its socialisms 
and materialisms, the world of organized Chris- 
tianity by its societies and mass movements, are 
all at work causing the individual to shrivel and 
the sense of personal responsibility to perish. 

Back to Christ That is our only salvation. We 
must open our New Testament and read again of 
the one sheep, the one coin, and the one boy. 
We must refresh our souls by listening to Jesus 
talk to the one man in the upper room, and to the one 
woman by the well. We must come back to Peter's 
pentecostal phrase, "every one of you," and learn 
how to speak with Pauline accent the names of in- 
dividual men. We must come back to the New 
Testament view point and see the human soul 
through his eyes. We have been thinking too much 
of what a man has, and not enough of what a man is. 
The newspapers have debauched us and demoral- 
ized us. They have told us about the millions, and 
the banquets, and the yachts, and the horses, and 
the summer homes, and we have come to think that 
these things are all-important. We need to go 
back to the record and read it again. " Unless a 
man forsake all that he hath, he cannot be my 
disciple." " A man's life consists not in the 
abundance of the things which he possesses." 
" What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the 
whole world and lose his own soul ? " 



202 CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 

We need to relearn the arithmetic of the Bible. 
Our modern arithmetic is all wrong. We are 
duped and enslaved by our inordinate love of 
figures. We overestimate the importance of large 
congregations. Our work is not to build large con- 
gregations, but large men. What does a large con- 
gregation amount to unless it is a nursery in 
which growing giants are being fed, who by and 
by will beat the Philistines and carry off the gates 
of Gaza? Jesus cared nothing for large congre- 
gations. He had one once, but soon got rid of 
it. He jabbed it with unpleasant truths until it 
left him, and then he gave himself to just twelve 
men. The weakest things our Lord ever did were 
the things he did with crowds : the greatest achieve- 
ment of his mighty life was the training of the 
twelve. We are too easily elated and too readily 
depressed by a simple fluctuation of figures. We 
gained ten thousand — Hurrah ! We lost ten 
thousand — Let us cry ! Who are we that we 
should reason thus ? Have you not read, have 
you not heard, that one shall chase a thousand, 
and two shall put ten thousand to flight ? Shame 
on the denomination that has produced a Horace 
Bushnell, a Henry Ward Beecher, and a Dwight 
L. Moody, if it ever measures its work by count- 
ing the crowds which march under its banner. One 
man can shape the mood and fix the standards of 
a community. One man can change the spiritual 
climate of a continent. One man can sweeten the 



CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 203 

springs of theological thought in two hemispheres. 
Let us not be frightened by statistics, but master 
the arithmetic of God. 

We must come back to our work. Our first 
work is not the solution of the social problem. As 
Harnack says, " The gospel is not one of social 
improvement but spiritual redemption. " The re- 
demption of the individual is the solution of all our 
problems. In him is the fountain in which the 
world will be washed clean ; from him will come 
the flames in which the world's iniquities shall be 
burned up like chaff. Our first work is feeling 
after the individual if haply we may find him. 
It is the finding of the one sinner which causes 
rejoicing among the angels of God, because only 
in this way does the Kingdom come and God's will 
get done throughout large areas of human life. 

God gives us men. " The finest fruit earth holds 
up to its Maker is a man." Personality holds 
within itself the powers which build the new 
Jerusalem. We have been told of the reign of law. 
There is no such thing. Natural law is but the 
conduct of a person. Persons alone reign. We 
live under the sovereignty of a personal God. We 
have been told that ours is a government of law 
and not of men. In the deepest sense the state- 
ment is not true. Our Constitution is written, but 
it is not fixed. From the beginning till now it has 
been modified by the men who interpreted it. It 
will be changed many times by the supreme judges 



204 CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 

of the future. A city has a charter, but a city is 
not ruled by its charter but by its men. What 
are laws if there are no men to enforce them ? The 
government of a community is determined not by 
the laws on the statute book, but by the disposition 
and character of its most influential citizens. 
Throughout the ages, humanity has been under 
the government of a man. 

An Englishman once tried to prove that humanity 
in its career and character has been chiefly con- 
trolled by its physical environment. Climate and 
soil, earthquakes and volcanoes, rainfall and wind, 
— these, he said, are the determining factors in 
racial development and national progress. It was 
a speculation which history shatters into a thousand 
pieces. God and men are the determining forces 
in human history. " On God and godlike men we 
build our trust," because from them have come 
all the blessings we have known. Confucius has 
had a mightier influence on the thought and 
customs of Asia than all the mornings that ever 
flushed with gold the snowy crowns of the Him- 
alayas. Luther and Calvin have left a deeper 
mark on Europe than Vesuvius with his torch of 
flame, or the Jungfrau with her diadem of snow. 
Shakespeare has done more to tinge the feelings 
and shape the imaginations of the English people 
than all the waves that ever broke in foam upon 
the coasts of their island home. Washington has 
done more to determine the character of American 



CONSECRATED PERSONALITY 205 

manhood than all the suns of all the systems of 
the Milky Way. The mind of one man laid across 
a nation's heart will sink down deeper into it than 
the bar of light let fall from the heaven-wide arch 
constructed of God's stars. Jesus of Nazareth, a 
carpenter, a teacher, without fortune, reputation, or 
human learning, has done more to form the disposi- 
tion and shape the ideals of the leading nations of 
the world than all the winds and ocean currents, 
and all the stars of all the heavens, and all the sea- 
sons which have traveled with their buds and birds 
and snows and storms across the lands. The 
foundation of our civilization is not an idea or a 
philosophy, not a principle or a system, but a 
man. " I am the way, the truth, and the life." 
The Redeemer of the world is a man. The ideal 
toward which we move is a man. The music to 
which we march is the music of the words which 
He spake and speaks ; " I am come that ye might 
have life, and that ye might have it more abun- 
dantly." 



X 

AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 



Thanksgiving sermon, Broadway Tabernacle, New York, 
November 29, 1906. 



208 



X 

AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 
"I saw an angel standing in the sun." — Rev. xix. 17. 

We have no time to study the vision of the 
Apostle in its connection with his other visions, 
nor can we hope to fathom the depth of the idea 
which lay in the Apostle's mind when he uttered 
the words. We have time only to snatch the sur- 
face meaning of the sentence, the idea which is 
most obvious and compelling. 

I saw an angel standing in the sun. The word 
" sun " needs no explanation. There are a few 
words which we can master without a commentary 
or dictionary, and this is one of them. The sun 
is an old acquaintance. It shone on us in our 
cradle and it has accompanied us all the way. It 
is the friend of everybody. Everybody has seen 
it, knows it, loves it. It is a huge mass of matter, 
an enormous ball of stuff, an immense spectacle 
of fiery splendor. It is matter raised to its highest 
point of brilliancy, physical stuff lifted to its lofti- 
est magnificence. The fiery heart of the universe 
bursts into blossom in the sun. Because it is so 
vast and so glorious it becomes the fit symbol of 

209 



210 AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 

the material creation. In that yellow disk at noon 
we have the consummate image of physical vast- 
ness, physical power, and physical glory. It is an 
image which cannot easily be hidden. It is raised 
aloft so that every eye can see it. Men of feeble 
vision are aware of its presence. Even blind men 
know that the sun is shining. The exile on Pat- 
mos saw what all of us have seen — he saw the 
sun. 

And he saw more. He saw an angel standing 
in the sun. What is an angel ? A being which 
transcends the world of matter, a representative of 
the celestial kingdom, a spiritual creature of im- 
measurable intelligence and power, a visitor from 
high heaven, a messenger from eternity, a servant 
of the most high God. The Apostle saw an angel 
standing in the sun. His keen and eager eyes 
caught a spiritual splendor that lay enshrined in 
the blaze of the material glory. He saw the wis- 
dom and power of the spiritual universe speaking 
from the center of the universe of matter. All 
this lies in the simple declaration — I saw an angel 
standing in the sun. 

These words have been chosen for my text be- 
cause they express in graphic phrase the thought 
which is my message to you for this day. On 
Thanksgiving Day every man sees the sun. If he 
does not, it is because he is incorrigibly stubborn 
or incurably blind. If he cannot see the sun 
where he happens to be standing, he ought to 



AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 21 1 

make efforts to see it. If he has been walking on 
the shady side of the street, let him come over on 
the sunny side, at least for a day. If he has per- 
chance fallen into a pit of despondency or hole of 
despair, or if, baffled by outrageous fortune, he has 
crawled defeated and dejected into a cave, let him 
come out of his cavern or dungeon and look for a 
season at the sun. Every one is likely at times 
to get shoved into the shade, to be crowded into a 
mood from which the whole world looks drab. 
But Thanksgiving Day is a trumpet reminding all 
somber-hearted men and women that the time has 
arrived to gaze at the sun. 

We are living in days when the sun is often over- 
cast. Mists go up from the pestilential places of 
the earth filling the air with poison and darkness. 
Many souls, like many chimneys, do not consume 
their own smoke and the result is a darkening 
of the heavens. There are men now alive, and 
women too, who have a genius for dipping their 
brush into hues of midnight and eclipse. They 
have a mania for exploiting the unsavory and sor- 
did. They take delight in brooding over the brutal 
and dismal. They scold and moan and shriek so 
constantly over the world's woes and sins that we 
forget that the sun is shining. The whole heavens 
are blotted out by lachrymose tales and lugubrious 
prophecies, as by chilling clouds driven inland 
from a murky storm-wild sea. 

There are men who live only to count up miseries 



212 AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 

and wrongs. They earn their living by picturing 
the forms and processes of the world of darkness. 
They earn large salaries by painting out the sun. 
There are newspapers which fly like flakes of 
darkness through the air, shadowing every mind 
into which they fall. But on Thanksgiving Day 
we will have nothing to do with the mopers and 
growlers. This is no day for the professional 
shriekers. A famous Grecian philosopher once 
said to the dashing Alexander the Great, " Stand 
out of my light." Let us say to the whole tribe 
of men who have jaundiced eyes and wailing pens, 
Get out of our light ; we want to see the sun ! 

Our President and Governor have asked us to 
look at the sun. Let us do it. If a man does not 
believe there is any sunshine any more, let him 
crawl out from under the avalanche of morbid and 
pessimistic literature by which he has been over- 
whelmed, and let him clamber to the top of a hill 
from which he can see the world as one vast plain 
and one boundless reach of sky. If the clouds 
have gathered round him, let him remember that 
the clouds are always low, and let him, by sheer 
energy of spirit, rise above the clouds into those 
clear regions where he can behold the sun. 

We are never where we ought to be if we cannot 
see the sun. If we have lost it, it is because we 
are hemmed in by barriers of our own creation or 
of other men ; which barriers give us a contracted 
view. The narrow view is always the depressing 



AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 213 

view. One can easily prove that New York is hell 
by looking into one small corner of it, that America 
is a nation of barbarians by cutting out a small spot 
here and there, that the world is slipping back by 
clipping out a thin slice of current history. It is 
not difficult to prove that the stream is flowing 
backward if you take your place at a point where 
an obstruction in the channel causes an eddy and a 
backward swirl of the waters which are impatient 
to get on. " Oh, it is dark, fearfully dark." That 
may be true of your own life and home — but your 
life is not the only life and your home is only one 
of many homes. " Oh, it is dark — there is no sun 
at all." That may be true in your business, in your 
social set, in your favorite papers and books, but 
your little world is not the universe. Your favorite 
authors are only a handful, your social set is an in- 
finitesimal ripple on the great ocean of life. Lift 
up your eyes and look at the sun — something 
big, something really glorious, something magnifi- 
cently immense. Those companions of yours who 
darken the world by their skepticism or quench the 
light by their sneers are only sulphur matches 
which the devil is striking in your presence. 
There is a flash, a smell of brimstone, a flicker- 
ing and evanescent blaze, and then smoke and 
blackness of darkness. Why not look at the sun ? 
Those authors of yours who have gotten you into 
a despondent mood about yourself and everybody 
else are only candle dips flickering in the gale. 



214 AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 

They cannot be depended upon for guidance. 
They have been burning only for a day, they will 
go out to-morrow. Why do you not look at some- 
thing that shines on and on through the centuries 
and ages and millenniums. Thanksgiving Day is 
a day whose message to all men is — Ho ye that 
sit in darkness, hold up your heads and look at the 
sun ! 

When men look up it is the material splen- 
dor which they see first. This is proper and 
to be expected. First that which is natural 
and afterward that which is spiritual. This is 
the invariable order. The blazing orb of na- 
tional prosperity — that is the sun which men 
most easily see, and we have a right to look at 
it and rejoice in it. Walk in imagination this 
morning across the land and let your eye run 
along that line of 303,267,000 bushel measures 
filled with potatoes dug this year out of our soil. 
Glance at that row of 36,000,000 barrels of ap- 
ples picked this year from our trees. Take in 
that pile of 12,500,000 bales of cotton grown 
this year in our fields. Fasten your eyes on 
those 30,000,000 bushels of rye, those 144,528,000 
bushels of barley, those 739,883,000 bushels of 
wheat, those 863,352,000 bushels of oats, those 
2,822,400,000 pounds of sugar, those 2,881,096,000 
bushels of corn. Sit down before that mountain 
range of good things. Measure the dimensions of 
this pile of five billion bushels of grain. Look at 



AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 215 

that sun. Warm yourself by it. No such sun 
has ever shone on America as the sun which has 
shone on it during the last eleven months. All 
past marvels have been eclipsed, all bygone mira- 
cles have been surpassed. 

Pass now from the kingdom of agriculture 
into the realm of commerce. See those long 
trains reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. 
Count the cars. Some man tried to do it and 
when he reached 5,588,162 he stopped. Every 
one of these cars filled with treasures of field 
and mine, of factory and mill, earning for the 
great railroad corporations in three quarters of a 
year the gross sum of $1,439,000,000. Look 
at the ships in the harbors along the Atlantic 
and along the Gulf and along the Pacific carry- 
ing merchandise to distant lands worth over 
$1,425,172,000 in ten months; these ships bring- 
ing home again over a billion dollars' worth 
of treasures from all the lands of the earth to 
make us a comfortable and happy people. Look 
at the sun. Never has it blazed with such efful- 
gence as now. See the streams of money. No 
such streams did Midas ever create or Croesus 
dream of or Caesar control. In the last ten 
months the bank clearings have gone beyond one 
hundred and thirty-one billions of dollars — a sum 
as inconceivable as is the distance from the earth 
to the north star. When the Census Bureau tells 
us that the national wealth now aggregates nearly 



2l6 AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 

$107,000,000,000 we stand bewildered and dazed. 
We are almost blinded by the light of the sun. 

But the question now is : Do you see an angel 
standing in the sun, a heavenly significance in 
this national prosperity, a divine meaning in those 
colossal triumphs? What do you see — just oats 
and rye and wheat, only cotton and sugar and pig 
iron ? Is your eye good only to take in freight 
cars and steamships and piles of gold coin, or can 
you see an angel in the sun, a token of divine 
mercy, a manifestation of heavenly generosity, a 
revelation of Infinite goodness, an assurance of a 
Father's benediction ? Is there any spiritual con- 
tent in this blazing orb of material aggrandize- 
ment, in the physical splendor is there a light 
above the brightness of the sun ? Or is this a 
physical phenomenon pure and simple, a material 
wonder unrelated to higher worlds, so much stuff 
massed together by so much muscle and so much 
gray matter in the brain ? Is that all you see ? 
If that is all, then you do not see so much as the 
man saw who said, " The earth is the Lord's and 
the fullness thereof." " Every beast of the forest 
is his and the cattle upon a thousand hills." " He 
causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herbs 
for the service of man ; that he may bring forth 
food out of the earth." The sun does not climb 
the heavens of its own volition and with its own 
inherent strength, nor does a nation rise to place 
and power without assistance from above. 



AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 21 7 

Blessings such as ours do not come by acci- 
dent, or drop from the hand of unthinking fate. 
It was not by chance that this continent was 
hidden from the Eastern world till 1492, nor 
was it by chance that men of spiritual vision 
laid in tears and blood the deep foundation stones 
upon which later men have builded, nor was it by 
chance that George Washington was born in 
1732 and that Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809 
and Theodore Roosevelt was born in 1858, nor 
is it by chance that the American brain has be- 
come fertile above all others in devising instru- 
ments and tools for using the forces of nature in 
the development of physical resources, and that 
American hands have become cunning above all 
others in manipulating the machinery by which 
the world's wealth is multiplied and the forces of 
civilization made mightier. I see an angel in the 
sun — a message from high heaven, a revelation 
of a spiritual intelligence and power, guiding all 
and sustaining all, wooing our hearts if we are 
willing to a new devotion to the Creator of us 
all. 

Now let us take a broader view, leaving our own 
little farms and gardens, and take in the whole 
material creation — earth and sea and sky. This 
physical universe which is our home, what is it 
but a great mass of matter hung in space, a mate- 
rial globe rolling with other globes onward we 
know not whither ? How like a coruscating, flam- 



/ 



218 AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 

ing sun it hangs before the eyes, lustrous, mysteri- 
ous, gloriously and indescribably beautiful. It is 
a sun which every man can see, but some men 
see far more than others. One man looks out on 
Nature, but for him it is not appareled in celestial 
light. He watches the seasons in their pomp, but 
the pageant gives to him no hint of the working 
of the mind of an Infinite Artist. He experiences 
the witchery of dusk and dawn, feels the magic 
of the loveliness of flowers, comes under the spell 
of moonlight upon the water, tingles under the 
touch of the glory of sunrise and the splendor of 
sunset, but he does not have 

" A sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky and in the mind of man, — 
A motion and a spirit that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things." 

In other words, he does not see the angel in the 
sun, the spiritual splendor enthroned in the physi- 
cal glory. What do you see in the sun ? Is the 
universe a vast machine, a stupendous mass of 
brute matter passing from one phase to another 
without purpose or benevolent intention, heedless v 
of man and ignorant of God, baffling the human j 
mind by its interminable processes and its inexpli- 
cable variations and ongoings ? What do you see ? 



AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 219 

A great disk of shining stuff — if that is all, you do 
not see so well as the man saw long ago who said : 

u The heavens declare the glory of God 
And the firmament sheweth his handiwork, 
Day unto day uttereth speech, 
And night unto night sheweth knowledge. 
There is no speech nor language ; 
Their voice is not heard. 
Their line is gone out through all the earth, 
And their words to the end of the world." 

This man saw an angel standing in the sun. 

Let us take a still wider view, embracing in our 
survey not simply the physical creation, but also 
the vast world of man. Human nature is a part 
of the universe, the highest and most mysterious 
part which we know anything about. Let your 
eyes rest on this. What do you see in the human 
race ? Roll all mortals into a huge mass, let that 
mass like a rolling sun hang before your eyes. 
What do you see ? A huge lump of flesh and 
blood born of the ground returning to dust again ? 
A vast aggregation of animals, hungry, biting, 
snapping, ruled by animal instincts, swayed by 
animal impulses, ending at last as animals end ? 
If that is all you see, you are no further advanced 
than the jaded Oriental skeptic who thousands of 
years ago declared in a fit of despondency : " That 
which bef alleth the sons of men befalleth beasts ; 
even one thing befalleth them ; as the one dieth, 
so dieth the other ; yea they have all one breath ; 



220 AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 

so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast ; 
for all is vanity. All go into one place ; all are of 
dust and all turn to dust again." What do you 
see ? Man's limitations and shortcomings, his 
weakness and ignorance, the insignificance of his 
efforts and the transitoriness of his earthly exist- 
ence? Anybody can see those; they are spots on 
the sun. 

Long ago a thinker in the distant East was sad- 
dened by the thought of man's infirmities and 
dejected by the experience of human frailties, but 
when he asked the question, What is man ? he saw 
an angel standing in the sun, and under the inspi- 
ration of the glowing vision he wrote a song which 
has been caught up and chanted the wide world 
over. 

" Thou hast made him a little lower than God, 
Thou hast crowned him with glory and honor. 
Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy 

hands. 
Thou hast put all things under his feet, 
All sheep and oxen, yea and the beasts of the field. 
The fowl of the air and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever 
passeth through the paths of the sea." 

And to the song of the Hebrew poet we may 
add another stanza and say, Yea, the force of the 
wind and the power of the wave and the pressure 
of steam, and the strength of gravity and the 
might of magnetism and the potency of heat and 
the almightiness of light, and the plunge of the 



AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 221 

cataract, and the energy of electricity, and the 
virtues and efficacies of all the cosmic forces, thou 
hast put these under his feet. " O Lord, our Lord, 
how excellent is thy name in all the earth ! " 

This is the day to look at the sun — the sun of 
our humanity. There are astronomers who can 
look into the disk of the orb of day and see noth- 
ing but raging storms of flaming gases. They 
see no angel there proclaiming the wisdom and 
omnipotence of the Creator. There are men who 
can look at humanity in the twentieth century, and 
while nations are making new conquests and break- 
ing the bonds of ancient tyrannies and rising to 
new levels of thought and achievement, these men 
can find no better words with which to describe 
the magnificent drama than animal, brute, beast. 
Of course there are animal characteristics, and 
brutish actions, and beastly degradation, and inhu- 
man conduct. But is this all? The sun has in- 
deed its spot, but is there no angel standing in the 
sun ? Can you see nothing in humanity but what 
smacks of the earth — greed and lust, cruelty and 
hate, tears and death ? This wonderful race of 
men of which we all are members, dowered with 
capacities which are immeasurable, intrusted with 
powers which are incalculable, with a destiny which 
is beyond the reach of our dreams, this race of 
men laughing and crying, achieving and suffering, 
hoping and despairing, cursing and praying, loving 
and hating, buying and selling, marrying and giv- 



222 AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 

ing in marriage, feasting and dancing and shrieking 
and singing, hungering and thirsting and everlast- 
ingly aspiring after the unattained and unattainable, 
driven by instincts which are ineradicable, swayed 
by impulses which are unconquerable, stirred and 
thrilled by visions and dreams which are inexpli- 
cable and unescapable, what a wonderful race it is ! 
What do you see in humanity? this great 
shining orb of human flesh ? Look for the angel 
to-day. Think of the mothers who through this 
last year have sacrificed themselves for their chil- 
dren ; of the fathers who have bravely kept on at 
their work that hungry mouths might be fed and 
naked feet might be covered ; of the teachers who 
have poured their life-blood into the souls of those 
intrusted to their guidance ; of the physicians who 
have alleviated pain and ministered to the dying ; 
of the nurses in the hospitals and sick chambers 
of the world, who have cheerfully borne privations 
and drudgeries that it might be easier for those on 
whom the hand of affliction had fallen heavy; of 
the philanthropists who have looked after little 
children and homeless boys and girls, and widows 
and helpless women, and broken and disheartened 
men ; of the reformers who have, in the midst of 
disappointments and discouragements, held their 
hand to the plow refusing to look back; of the 
rich men who have poured out of their treasures 
to succor the poor and to give strength to noble 
causes which needed assistance ; of the poor men 



AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 223 

and women who have shared their last crust with 
some one poorer than themselves, and made a bed 
in their humble lodging for some one who had no- 
where to lay his head ; of the servant girls who 
have denied themselves pleasures and oftentimes 
comforts that they might send their savings to a 
father or mother, or sick sister or brother in the 
old home across the sea ; of the men through 
whose hands a constant stream of gold has been 
flowing through six days of every week, and who 
have a right this day, according to the test im- 
posed by the psalmist, to ascend into the hill of 
the Lord, because they have kept their hands 
clean and have not lifted up their hearts unto 
vanity; of the men who have faced death with- 
out flinching in the fire departments and police 
departments, at the life-saving stations and on 
the railroads, laying down their lives at the call 
of duty, saving lives by giving up their own ; of 
the missionaries who at home and abroad have 
worked in obscure and dangerous places far away 
from home and kindred, counting all things but 
dross for the sake of the Name which is above 
every name ; of all the workers, high and low, 
rich and poor, famous and unnoticed, in city, town, 
and hamlet, who this last year have done some- 
thing to lighten a burden, to dissipate a darkness, 
to heal a hurt heart, to smooth the road for feet 
which were bleeding, to wipe away tears, to soothe 
an ache, to banish a suspicion, or prejudice, or 



224 AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 

error, to diminish the gloom, to kindle a light in 
minds which were bewildered, and create a glow 
in hearts which were troubled and chilled ! Look 
at the sun, the race of man, our race ! Do you 
not see an angel standing in the sun ? intelligence 
more than animal, wisdom more than earthly, 
power more than human, loveliness more than 
physical ? Can you not see an angel — an inspi- 
ration from on high, a manifestation of heaven, a 
revelation of Deity ? 

Let us now come up still higher and fix our eyes 
on that one face which is above every face, and 
behold the man who, although a part of our hu- 
manity, is yet above it. It would be a strange 
Thanksgiving Day without a glance at the Sun 
of Righteousness. What do you see in this sun ? 
Of course you see the light. No such light as this 
has ever been seen either before or since. " Never 
man spoke like this man." So said the wise men 
in the first century, so say the wise men of our day. 
" We never saw it after this fashion." So said the 
men who saw his miracles, and so say the men who 
see his miracles in the world of now. His name is 
above every name in every land where character 
is valued and high ideals are prized. Every tongue 
confesses that he is mightiest of the holy and 
holiest of the mighty. Like a full-orbed sun he 
shines upon the earth, and all other teachers are, 
compared with him, what the planets are to the 
sun. 



AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 225 

This is a day on which to look at the sun. What 
do you see ? A man — a Jewish patriot, a Pales- 
tinian philosopher, an Oriental martyr, a blazing 
prophet, a fiery-eyed reformer, a sweet and stain- 
less saint ? If that is all you see, you see no more 
than the Pharisees, for they thought he was a 
prophet, a man as tall-statured as John the Bap- 
tist. You see no more than the Sadducees, for 
they thought he was a patriot, a man of the same 
temper as Jeremiah. You see no more than the 
crowds in old Jerusalem, for every man was con- 
vinced that this Jesus of Nazareth was a prophet, 
a mighty teacher, a daring and revolutionary re- 
former. You see no more than the apostle Philip, 
for Philip saw only the glory of Christ's humanity, 
and was blind to the light eternal. " Show us the 
Father and it sufnceth us. Let us see God and we 
shall be satisfied." And the answer came, " Have 
I been so long time with you and hast thou not 
known me, Philip ? He that hath seen me hath 
seen the Father. Believe me that I am in the 
Father and the Father in me. You see my works, 
you hear my words, you know my career. You 
behold the full-orbed glory of a perfect life, do 
you not see the angel in the sun — do you not 
recognize the divine intelligence, the heavenly 
power, the stamp of the eternal? Are you so 
absorbed in the contemplation of my physical fea- 
tures, that you have missed the revelation of the 
divine ? I have lived among you in the fashion of 



226 AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 

a man, in the form of a servant, the bodily out- 
lines being altogether such as belong to the world 
of space and time, subject at every point to the 
physical conditions to which all men are subject, 
and is this earthly aspect of my life all that your 
eye has caught, all that your mind has discerned, 
all that your heart has discovered ? Have I been 
so long with you and yet hast thou not known me, 
Philip?" 

This is the age-long tragedy of this world 
— the blindness of men to the angel in the sun. 
Material things we apprehend with alacrity and 
gladness. We can taste, touch, handle them. 
But the divine significance of things on earth 
continually eludes us, the spiritual interpreta- 
tion of what we see and hear perpetually es- 
capes us. Thanksgiving Day calls us out of our 
materialistic mood and says, " Behold the angel 
in the sun ! " 

Alas, even the voice of Thanksgiving Day is not 
sufficient to arouse many a soul from its lethargy 
or remove the scales from the eyes. It is only by 
a strenuous effort that we can keep the angel 
visible in the Thanksgiving sun. The day, like 
every other great day, has a tendency to degenerate, 
to lose its spiritual significance, and to become a 
day of boisterous recreation and unrestrained 
feasting. The Thanksgiving dinner is central in 
the thought of the day. The dinner becomes 
the symbol of the national prosperity, of physical 



AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 227 

enjoyment, of creature comfort. And who would 
say that the dinner shall not rightfully stand con- 
spicuous and beautiful in the day, that this glowing 
sun shall be hidden, and not be permittted to shed 
its rays upon our hearts and faces ? Let him say 
such a thing who can, -not I. Rather will I 
say, Let men and women feast throughout the 
land, and let every home be filled with social cheer. 
Let broken family circles be reunited, the old 
acquaintances meet again. Let the Thanksgiving 
sun blaze in unveiled splendor and fill all the house 
with floods of glory, but at the feast let us look 
with eyes intent for the angel standing in the sun. 
Alas for us if we miss the spiritual significance of 
it all, the heavenly meaning of the banquet, the 
divine origin of our joys. 

At the center of every physical pleasure stands 
an angel proclaiming the goodness of the Creator. 
He is the giver of every gift which cheers the 
nerves or warms the heart or satisfies the spirit. 
Good things to eat and a good appetite to enjoy 
them and good friends to share our joy with us, all 
these things come straight from the heart of a God 
who loves us, and all these would be impossible in 
a universe created by a God who did not have a 
loving heart. A Thanksgiving dinner to the 
observing soul becomes sacramental. It is the 
supper of our Lord. It is the visible sign of 
spiritual grace, bodying forth the loving-kindness 
of the Eternal. Happy are we if in the full-orbed 



228 AN ANGEL IN THE SUN 

glory of every pleasure which comes to body, mind, 
or spirit we behold the presence of the angel, God's 
supreme messenger to the race of men, the form 
and power and glory of Him who loved us and gave 
himself for us ! 



XI 
YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 



Address before the International Council, Tremont Temple, 
Boston, September 26, 1899. 



230 



XI 

YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 

The nineteenth century will shine in history as a 
century of discoveries. An English scientist has 
given us a list of them, but he has omitted the 
greatest of them all, the discovery of the child. 
Accurately speaking, we should say the " re-dis- 
covery of the child," for the child was first 
discovered nineteen hundred years ago by the 
Carpenter of Nazareth. In the first century of our 
era Jesus took a child and set him in the midst, 
and he has done it again in the century which is 
now drawing to a close. 

He has set him in the midst of the artists. Ever 
since the days of Joshua Reynolds artists in 
increasing numbers have been painting children. 
Not only do they paint little princes and princesses, 
but they paint ragamuffins and street urchins. 
The world would rather look at the faces of 
children than at the angels of the mediaeval 
masters. A child is more interesting than an 
angel. 

He has set him in the midst of the poets. It 
was not until the days of William Blake that poets 

231 



232 YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 

began to gather round a child. Nearly all the 
child poetry of the world's literature has been 
written since the days of Wordsworth. Now the 
poets are saying with our own Longfellow : — 

" Come to me, O ye children ! 
And whisper in my ear 
What the birds and the winds are singing 
In your sunny atmosphere. 
Ye are better than all the ballads 
That ever were sung or said, 
For ye are living poems, 
And all the rest are dead." 

He has set him in the midst of the psychologists, 
and they are studying him furiously. They are 
looking at his motions, they are listening to his 
language, they are peering into his little mind, and 
tabulating all they see there. The evolution of a 
solar system is not so fascinating to the philosopher 
of to-day as is the unfolding of a soul. 

He has set him in the midst of the church. We 
have our Children's Sundays and our Christmas 
concerts and our Sunday-school picnics, our cradle 
rolls and baby bands, and innumerable societies for 
the instruction and safeguarding of the children. 
The greatest work which the church has done in 
the nineteenth century has been done among the 
young. 

Three great religious movements have made the 
century forever glorious, all three of them born of 
a passion to save young people. First of all and 
greatest of all is the Sunday-school. Although it 



YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 233 

was born near the close of the last century, it is 
distinctly a nineteenth-century movement, for this 
is the century in which it has been developed into 
an institution of world-wide usefulness and im- 
measurable and transfiguring power. On this single 
continent there are to-day nearly one hundred and 
fifty thousand Sunday-schools, with a million and 
a half of officers and teachers and almost twelve 
million scholars. Twelve million human beings ! 
the majority of them children, studying the Scrip- 
tures ! Look at that and you can behold with the 
eye of faith Satan falling as lightning from heaven. 
The second great movement of the century is 
the Young Men's Christian Association. The 
century was nearly half over before the first asso- 
ciation was organized ; but already the movement 
has struck its roots down into the soil of more than 
forty countries, and enrolls an army of a quarter of 
a million of men. Out of this young men's move- 
ment has sprung a Young Women's Christian 
Association, which, although as yet only in the 
days of its infancy, has a membership of nearly 
forty thousand. And out of these combined asso- 
ciations has sprung in these recent days the Student 
Volunteer Movement, which has already circled 
the globe with its victories, and promises to do 
more for foreign missions than any other organiza- 
tion that has ever attempted to stir the hearts of 
men to obedience to the great marching order of 
the King : " Go ye, and disciple the nations." 



234 YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 

Fourteen hundred volunteers are already in the 
foreign field, and four thousand others are in train- 
ing. Six thousand students are studying the 
problems of foreign missions, and increasing streams 
of money are flowing into our missionary treasuries 
from our halls of learning. The colleges of the 
world are being knit together into a compact 
brotherhood whose purpose is to claim humanity 
for God. 

The century was more than three-quarters gone 
before the third great movement of our age was 
born. It was in 1881 that the Young People's 
Society of Christian Endeavor started upon its 
phenomenal career. At the end of eighteen years 
it has fifty-six thousand societies, with a member- 
ship of three million four hundred thousand. But 
these figures do not tell the full story of its con- 
quests. Like the river of God, it overflows its 
banks, and in all parts of Christendom new societies 
with new names spring into existence, begotten by 
the spirit which the Endeavor movement has 
created and strengthened and instructed by its 
example and its methods. A million and a half of 
young men and women, although marching under 
other banners, belong to the great Endeavor army. 
Five millions of the young people of the world 
organized into a training school for Christian 
service in less than two decades ! It is one of the 
miracles of Christian history. The future historian 
of the Christian church will say that Christendom 



YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 23$ 

entered upon a new era that February night when 
in the city of Portland the first Endeavor society 
was formed. 

Where is that man who said that the church has 
lost its grip, and that Christianity is a decrepit and 
declining thing ? Let him read the history of the 
last fifty years, and if he has eyes to see he will 
see. But I am not asked to do the work of a 
historian to-night, recounting with hallelujahs the 
things already done. I am asked to be a prophet, 
bidden to gaze into the century that is upon us, and 
to report what I see. Not what have we done, but 
what shall we do, — that is the question.^ 

And my answer is, Pay more attention to the 
home. The home is the making place of Chris- 
tians, and it is because so many Christians are 
made otherwhere that we have so many Christians 
who are maimed and disappointing. All acute 
thinkers from the time of Aristotle have seen that 
the family is the unit of society. It is the founda- 
tion out of which all the streams of life proceed. 
The Christian church must lay its hand with redeem- 
ing pressure upon the family. For the family is in 
danger. The great conflict of the coming century 
is going to rage around the home. Multitudinous 
forces are gathering to disintegrate the foundation 
stone on which our civilization rests. Steam and 
electricity by teasing men to travel tear them in 
increasing numbers from the family hearth. Phi- 
losophies, specious and satanic, are undermining 



2$6 YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 

the sanctity of marriage. Commercial life and 
club life and social life have all conspired to take 
parents from their children. The multiplication of 
religious organizations has weakened the sense of 
parental responsibility, and fathers and mothers 
have too often turned over to others duties which 
God gave to parents. 

The result is that the church does not hold her 
children as she ought. Every minister knows that 
around his church there are three zones of people, 
all of them descended from Christian stock. In 
the inner zone are people who are in sympathy 
with the church, though not members of it. They 
attend its services and contribute to its support. 
In the middle zone are men and women who, though 
born into Christian homes, never go to church. 
They do not hate the church, but its forms to them 
are weariness, and they are deaf to its appeals. In 
the outer zone are the publicans and sinners; men 
and women who were rocked in Christian cradles 
and kissed by Christian mothers and taught by 
Christian teachers, but who have given up both reli- 
gion and morality, and have nothing for the church 
but flippant scorn and bitter hatred. There is a leak 
somewhere. In spite of the long line of organiza- 
tions marshaled with such consummate skill for the 
protection of our children from the cradle to adult- 
hood, too many of them get away from us. The 
chain seems to be unbroken and unbreakable, but 
alas ! the first link is the weak link, and because 



YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 237 

the first link so often snaps, we suffer humiliation 
and defeat. Every organization would do better 
service if supported better by the home. 

Has not the time come, therefore, for a new 
study of the family ? The home is a divine insti- 
tution. It is God's way to set the solitary in 
families. He educates the race through the dis- 
cipline of the family. Under the Jewish dispen- 
sation religion went by households ; so it did when 
Christianity was young. Baptism went by house- 
holds, as in the case of Stephanas and Lydia and 
the Philippian jailer. The Lord's Supper went by 
households. The eucharist was celebrated in the 
house. The church was in the house before it 
worked its way out into society, and the church in 
society must inevitably limp and fall unless we 
keep alive the church in the house. Instruction 
went by households. Apostles in writing to the 
saints had a message for the children. No child 
was to be called an alien, even though only one 
parent was a Christian, for even in that case a 
child was not unclean but holy. 

We ought to face, then, the question, Is a child 
born of Christian parents inside the church or out- 
side ? If it is outside, then the kingdom of God 
is one thing and the Christian church is another 
thing, for Christ has explicitly declared that chil- 
dren are in the kingdom of God. If the child is 
outside the church at birth, can it be carried into 
the church in its mother's arms ? If not, then the 



238 YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 

disposition of the church is not the disposition of 
the Master, for he said, " Suffer the little children 
to come unto me, and forbid them not." If the 
child is in the church, then it should be recognized 
publicly and continuously throughout all the years. 
The church should baptize it, if not in infancy at 
least as early as the child's mind is capable of 
grasping the significance of the ceremony. And if 
we baptize our children, why have they not a right 
to the Supper of the Lord ? On what ground do 
we make such wide distinction between the two 
sacraments of the church ? How can we in reason 
say that a child has a right to the symbol of God's 
cleansing power, and no right to the symbol of 
God's sustaining grace ? If the little Jewish boy 
was permitted to partake of the paschal lamb, 
certainly our children ought to partake of the 
symbol of the broken body of the Lamb that was 
slain from the foundation of the world. If baptism 
goes by households, so also ought the eucharist. 
A new glory will come into our churches when 
parents and their children shall take bread and 
wine together. Many a boy would have been 
saved to the Christian church had he not been 
trained to feel himself a vagabond and outcast on 
every Communion Sunday. 

But there are other ways in which this recogni- 
tion can be made conspicuous and effective. At 
the age of seven children may be presented 
with Bibles in the presence of the congregation. 



YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 239 

At the age of thirteen they may be examined 
publicly before the church on the fundamentals of 
our faith. Their names should be printed in the 
church directory from the date of baptism. Their 
needs should be recognized in the sermons of the 
preacher. If St. Paul in his loftiest letters did not 
forget the children, no Christian minister need feel 
it beneath his dignity to give a paragraph now 
and then in the midst of his most ponderous dis- 
courses to the boys and girls who have been bap- 
tized into the name of Christ, and whom the New 
Testament reckons among the faithful and the 
saints. 

But recognition is not enough. Children must 
be fed. The problem of the Christian church is at 
bottom a problem of feeding. The first line in the 
bill of instructions given to the chief of the apostles 
is divinely significant — " Feed my lambs." If the 
church fails to grasp the meaning of the first line, 
all its after life is bound in shallows and in mis- 
eries. Children must be fed. If they are fed, 
they will be " born again " in the nursery. It is 
no more necessary for a child to be conscious of 
the second birth than of the first birth. Conver- 
sion is a process that ought to be begun in the 
cradle. If children are fed, they grow. If they 
are fed on the life of God, they grow into the image 
of his Son. A child ought to be nourished by an 
atmosphere of Christian love. Atmosphere is the 
spiritual milk which little children drink, and build 



240 YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 

up into character. When the mind unfolds, the 
Scriptures should be studied. Father and Mother 
should unfold the Word. The father is God's first 
priest in history and in all life. If the parent priest 
shirks or falters, all other priests are engaged in a 
well-nigh hopeless task. If Christian men in the 
few leisure moments of the morning feed them- 
selves on newspapers, and take no time to feed 
their children on the Bible, let no one wonder if the 
Christian church runs the race that is set before it 
like a limping giant with a wounded heel. 

Parents must be assisted in this instructional 
work. O for a catechism in all our churches 
throughout the world ! The catechisms of the 
sixteenth century have been outgrown, but the need 
of catechetical instruction will never be outgrown 
so long as the human mind retains its present 
structure and is held in the grip of the laws which 
have governed it from the beginning. The church 
has never made lasting conquests, except where 
it has used the interlocutory method of instruction. 
The Jewish church built itself four-square and im- 
pregnable by this method of question and answer. 
It was by the same method that Christianity made 
its first great conquests. When Julian the Apostate 
wished to check the growth of Christianity, he 
stopped the mouths of Christian teachers. When 
Martin Luther wished to fortify Protestantism 
against the attacks of Rome, he wrote two cate- 
chisms. When John Calvin undertook to estab- 



YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 24 1 

lish a system of church government that neither 
men nor devils could tear down, he wrote a cate- 
chism. When Rome determined to break the 
power of Protestantism, she betook herself with 
new fervor under the inspiration of Loyola to 
catechetical instruction. With all her follies and 
crimson sins Rome goes on her conquering way 
because she knows the value of a child. The 
voice of Xavier still rings through all her coun- 
cils, " Give me the children until they are seven 
years old and any one can take them after- 
wards." There is no more impressive spectacle to 
be seen in St. Peter's to-day than the sight of a 
priest on Sunday afternoon catechising the little 
Italian boys. There in earth's greatest temple, 
filled with immortal marble and matchless paint- 
ings, at the very center of the splendor sits a little 
child with a priest by his side. That is a picture 
worth looking at, for we are in danger of for- 
getting that any church, even though its his- 
tory runs back to Plymouth Rock and Scrooby, 
is crippled and doomed that does not catechise 
her children. 

Instruction — painstaking, continuous, system- 
atic instruction — this is the crying need of the 
Christian church of our day. We are living in an 
age of books, but in our day, as in the days of 
Hosea, God's lamentation is, " My people are 
destroyed for lack of knowledge." Thousands of 
Christians are scared by higher criticism because 



242 YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 

they do not know what higher criticism is. Thou- 
sands are confused and bewildered, fumbling at 
duties and stumbling over mysteries which are no 
mysteries at all. Thousands are cold and indifferent 
because they do not know the things which brace the 
will and set the blood on fire. Thousands are car- 
ried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight 
of men, and by the superficial speculations of deluded 
women. Any Simon Magus who gives out that 
he is some great one is certain of a following. 
And every sort of superstition and delusion and hal- 
lucination can count its converts by the thousands 
because God's people are not instructed. We have 
had Niagaras —yes, Noachian floods — of ex- 
hortation ; let us now have clear-cut, courageous, 
constructive teaching ! 

It is not unlikely that the greatest advance that 
the Christian church is going to make in the twen- 
tieth century will be in the expansion of the Bible 
school. The Bible school is only in its infancy, 
and of what it is capable of becoming we have 
scarcely dreamed. We are just beginning to real- 
ize the necessity for it. America started out with 
the Bible and the catechism in her public schools. 
The catechism long ago disappeared, and the Bible 
is departing, and they will never come back again. 
Our public schools are destined to be secular. 
But it is becoming increasingly clear that secular 
education is not enough. Men may know the 
three R's and not know Him whom to know aright 



YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CPIURCH 243 

is life eternal. Men and women versed in science, 
art, and literature are not strong enough to build 
enduring nations or a victorious church. Without 
moral instruction and spiritual training humanity 
is lost. All around our schoolhouses we have 
been building penitentiaries and jails, and the jails 
are as crowded as the schools. We have dis- 
covered that educated men can get into the 
penitentiary, and that cultivated people can be 
hoodwinked and gulled by any high-sounding false- 
hood that comes along. Never have we had more 
education and never have we had more cranks and 
fanatics and dupes. 

Thinking men are asking, what shall we do ? 
The Roman Catholic Church has given her answer 
in brick and stone from the Atlantic to the Pacific. 
Her answer is the parochial school. What shall 
our answer be ? The Bible school. Not the Bible 
school as we have it now, but the Bible school 
indefinitely expanded and perfected. Why should 
it not be made more flexible and all-embracing ? 
Why should not the time of its sessions be deter- 
mined by the demands of the parish ? And when 
necessary, why should there not be a session of 
the school at every hour Sunday afternoon, and on 
every afternoon of every week, and on every even- 
ing of the week, so that all classes of people might 
find it possible to attend ? And why should not 
the curriculum of the Bible school be vastly ex- 
panded ? Why should not our young people be 



244 YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 

taught the history of the Bible, and the history of 
doctrine, and the history of the Christian church, 
and the scope and aim of Biblical criticism — 
yes, and the history of Congregationalism ? Our 
heroes and saints have written a book of Acts 
worthy of a place by the side of the book written 
by St. Luke. Why should not our young people 
know the rock whence we were hewn, and the 
hole of the pit whence we are digged ? 

With this larger conception of the Bible school 
we are going to give a new dignity to teachers. 
They are going to be recognized more and more 
as ministers of the Lord, ordained for a divine and 
difficult service, and trained and furnished by com- 
petent instructors. Some day Christian men and 
women gifted for the work of teaching will be 
ashamed to do what thousands of our best people 
are doing now — turning their back upon the 
greatest opportunity which God can give a human 
soul. Christians who teach in Bible schools are 
writing God's thoughts on minds which will live 
when the last of the stars has burnt out, and are 
hastening the coming of the city with the jasper 
walls and the gates of pearl. 

We are passing into a century which is going to 
be swept by tremendous intellectual storms. The 
winds of doctrine spoken of by the apostle were 
only zephyrs compared with the gales which are 
going to blow. For three hundred years we have 
been teaching men that every man has a right to 



YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 245 

think for himself, and now we must take the con- 
sequences. Books are multiplying, libraries are 
growing, the air is filled with all sorts of philoso- 
phies and sciences, speculations and interpretations. 
Men everywhere are reading, men everywhere are 
thinking. They must be guided into the thoughts 
of God. Ours is preeminently a teaching church, 
and if we do not teach we are basely recreant to 
our trust. Attacks, furious and multitudinous, 
must be expected upon every doctrine of our faith. 
We must teach our young people how to meet 
these assaults. The young men of Europe in 
medieval times flung themselves in magnificent 
crusades upon the Holy Land, in frenzied efforts 
to tear Christ's sepulcher from the clutches of the 
Turk. Young men and women of the twentieth 
century must march in many an arduous crusade 
against an enemy more wily and determined than 
the followers of Mohammed. Never shall we 
fight again with carnal weapons for the defense 
or advance of our religion, but war must there 
always be. The sword for our warriors is the 
sword of the Spirit. The sword of the Spirit is 
the Word of God. What is that Word? The 
church must seek for it as for treasure hidden in 
a field, and having found it, must teach it to the 
young. 

The world is increasingly preoccupied and con- 
ceited, and the church like a timid Timothy blushes 
and hesitates. Paul says to her, " Take heed to 



246 YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH 

thyself and the teaching." The world is increas- 
ingly inquisitive. It has written interrogation 
points over every book of Scripture, and across 
every form of spiritual experience. Peter says to 
the church, " Be ready always to give an answer 
to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope 
that is in you." The world is increasingly furious 
in its pursuit of pleasure and of fortune. The 
forces of materialism are tremendous and aggres- 
sive. Only men of firmest fiber and instructed 
faith, men with convictions that have been forged 
and tempered in the heat of God's eternal love 
which burned its way into our world through the 
heart that broke on Golgotha, can carry the cross 
through the coming storms. Listen to what the 
Spirit of the risen and reigning Christ is saying to 
the churches. We have heard it from the begin- 
ning, let us hear it now again : " Feed my lambs. 
Shepherd my sheep. Feed my sheep." 



XII 

CHRISTIAN UNITY 



Preached on April 21, 1907, in the Broadway Tabernacle, 
New York, the Sunday preceding the Wednesday evening on 
which the Church took action in regard to the Proposed Plan 
of Tri-Union. 



248 



XII 
CHRISTIAN UNITY 

" Endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of 
peace." — Eph. iv. 3. 

That is the w^y it stands in the version of the 
New Testament which was made in the seven- 
teenth century, but the revisers have changed the 
word endeavoring, substituting in its place giving 
diligence. They felt that the old expression was lL ^ 
not strong enough, it does not express all that was 
in the apostle's mind. The word which he made 
use of suggests exertion, effort. This is not an 
easy thing that he is asking the Ephesians to do. 
It is something which can be done only by the^* 
forthputting of energy. It will require a deal of 
industry and a deal of strength/- They must be 
busy about it, they must keep it, for there is dan- 
ger that it may disintegrate or evaporate, or be 
stolen. It is something immeasurably valuable, 
and therefore it is worth while to be diligent about 
the keeping of it. And what is this valuable thing ? 
Christian unity. " Giving diligence to keep the 
unity of the Spirit " — the unity which the spirit 
of God creates, strive earnestly to keep that in 
the bond of peace ! He has already told them how 

249 



250 CHRISTIAN UNITY 

this can be done. It is to be done by cultivating 
certain virtues and graces. Without these virtues 
and graces it is impossible to secure unity, much 
less to keep it. The first of the graces is lowli- 
ness. Paul begins where Christ always began, 
with humility. That is the first rung in the ladder. ^^ 
Unless we begin there, we can never ascend. It is 
the first step toward the attainment of Christian 
unity — lowliness of mind. And out of this lowli- 
ness of mind will come meekness or gentleness, 
and out of this meekness will come longsuffering, 
and the longsuffering will express itself in forbear-^ 
ance. Unless Christians are willing to forgive, toi-- 
bear and forbear, it is impossible for peace to pre- 
vail. And then he tells the Ephesians what are 
the grounds of this unity. There are solid foun- 
dations on which it can rest. They lie in the very 
nature of God and in the universe which he has 
built. There is one body, one spirit, one hope, 
one Lord, and one faith, and one baptism, and, 
finally, there is but one God, who is over all, and 
through all, and in all. But notwithstanding the 
fact that God desires this unity and is willing to 
cooperate with men in creating it, it is not some- 
thing to be expected either to-day or to-morrow. 
It is a high attainment to be reached only as the 
goal of spiritual growth. In the earlier stages of 1^ 
development there must of necessity be clashing 
and conflict, discord and misunderstanding. But 
all these dissonances will gradually disappear, for 



CHRISTIAN UNITY 25 I 

God will give the church officers, teachers, evangel- 
ists, prophets, pastors, whose supreme business will 
be to develop in Christians the graces which the 
apostle has named, to awaken in them sympathies 
and affections which will make this unity possible. 
Under their ministration the church will pass from 
glory to glory until we all come in the unity of the 
faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God unto 
a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of 
the fullness of Christ. My theme to-day is Chris- 
tian Unity. 

It is a significant fact that the theme of the pro- 
foundest chapter in Paul's greatest letter is the 
unity of the Christian church. Never does the 
apostle rise higher than he does in this fourth 
chapter of his letter to the Ephesians, and never 
does he go deeper, never does his language burn 
with a more fervent heat, never is his thought 
more august and thrilling. It is likewise signifi- 
cant that the uppermost theme in the greatest 
prayer of our Lord which is recorded in the New 
Testament is Christian unity. On the night in 
which he was betrayed he offered a prayer in the 
upper chamber which is the greatest of all re- 
corded prayers since time began. He prays for 
various things in this prayer, but for nothing does 
he plead with such earnestness as for unity. " Holy 
Father," he says, "keep through thine own name 
those whom thou hast given me that they may be 
one as we are." In these words he referred to the 



252 CHRISTIAN UNITY 

eleven men who were with him in the room, but by 
and by his thought takes a larger sweep, his mind 
runs down the ages, and he sees the countless mil- 
lions who shall come to God through him. " Neither 
pray I for these alone, but for them also which 
shall believe on me through their word, that they 
all may be one as thou Father art in me and I in 
thee, that they also may be one in us." Nor does 
he even now leave the thought. He dwells upon 
it, hovers round it, goes back to it as though he 
could not let it go. It is his deepest, most fervent 
wish, his supreme and crowning desire, " that they 
may be one even as we are one: I in them and 
thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one." 
And then he adds the reason why it is that he 
pleads so earnestly for this great blessing. It is 
" that the world may know that thou hast sent 
me." Here, then, we have come upon something 
which every professing Christian must often pon- 
der : it is the unity of Christians which is to dem- 
onstrate before the world the divinity of Christ. 
It is the harmony among his followers which is to 
prove to men that he came down from heaven. 
The truth of the Christian religion is not some- 
thing to be demonstrated by the eloquence of 
preachers or established by the wisdom of theolo- 
gians, or made certain by the learning of scholars. 
Spiritual unity is the one demonstration by which 
the world can be convinced, and to that demon- 
stration every Christian can make his contribu- 



CHRISTIAN UNITY 253 

tion. The humblest man in the church, the weakest 
woman in the church, the youngest boy and girl in 
the church, can help supply the credentials by which 
Christianity shall gain a hearing, and every soul 
baptized into the name of Jesus can contribute 
something to the demonstration by which his 
divinity shall be established before the world. 
This is the only argument which the world will 
ever understand. All other arguments are too ab- 
struse, too abstract, too difficult to follow. Chris- 
tian unity is a demonstration which everybody can 
understand, and to contribute to this demonstra- 
tion is the supreme Christian duty. According to 
the New Testament there never can be but one 
Christian church. At a certain point in Paul's life 
he was greatly distressed because the rumor had 
gone abroad that he was teaching one thing and 
the other apostles were teaching something else. 
If this were true, he felt that the very life of the 
Christian church was at stake. He knew that if 
there are two Christian churches, both of them 
must inevitably go to the wall. By the very na- 
ture of things there can be but one church and 
one message. And this also was the conviction of 
Jesus. When he made the great promise to Simon 
Peter, he did not say, " Upon this rock I will build 
my churches," but " Upon this rock I will build my 
church, and the gates of hades shall not prevail 
against it." There is to be only one flock, as there 
is only one shepherd. 



254 CHRISTIAN UNITY 

Probably there is no other subject receiving so 
much attention in the Christian world to-day as 
the subject of Christian unity. The subject is in 
the air. It is in the air everywhere. It has a 
place, not in one denomination, but in all denomi- 
nations; not in one country, but in all countries. 
It is a vital theme around the world. Steam and 
electricity within the last hundred years have done 
wondrous things. They have taken the villages and 
massed them into cities. They have taken the cities 
and bound them together so that every city knows 
what every other city thinks and does. They have » 
taken the nations and bound them together into a 
great family, so that common thoughts and feel- 
ings flow around the world. The great problem ^ 
to-day is how to live together, how to get rid of 
the discords and the conflicts, how to nourish co- 
operation and promote harmony. This feeling has 
taken possession of every one of the departments 
of life. It is mighty in the commercial world. 
The old order has broken down. For the sake of 
economy, men are combining. The old system was 
too extravagant ; it led to frightful squandering of 
money. And so we are living in an age of cor- 
porations, syndicates, trusts. We are living in a 
day of new perils, perils so gigantic and so for- 
midable that united action becomes imperative, 
individualism can do nothing with them ; only a 
concerted attack can make the slightest impres- 
sion. And so everywhere there are new dreams 



CHRISTIAN UNITY 255 

of cooperation, federation, union. On every hand £^ 
we have alliances, and leagues, and federations. 
It is not to be wondered at, then, that the Christian 
church should be seized by this spirit and that 
Christians everywhere should be asking them- 
selves, How can we reduce the friction ? How 
can we get closer together ? Edward Everett 
Hale was right when he said that the great word 
of the next hundred years will be " together." 
Christians of all communions are asking them- 
selves, How can we, as disciples of Christ, come 
closer together in our work ? How can we in- 
crease our efficiency ? How can we do the work 
with finer economy ? How can we best glorify the 
name of our Leader? These are the questions 
which are stirring in Christian hearts everywhere, 
and so the air is filled with schemes and projects 
of church union. All sorts of plans and devices 
have been brought forth by means of which the 
divisions may be reduced in number and the army 
of Christ be made more formidable in its attack 
upon iniquity and wrong. In a time like this, there- 
fore, it behooves every Christian to study carefully 
the problems which Christian unity involves. We 
do not live here but once, and our age is the age 
through which God speaks to us. We are not to 
turn a deaf ear to it, or turn our back upon it; 
we are to study it, and listen to it, and see what, 
through it, the Almighty is saying unto us. It is 
by the study of the signs of the times that we are 



256 CHRISTIAN UNITY 

to read the disposition and intention of God. When 
men everywhere are thinking about Christian unity, 
it is indisputable proof that it is God's will that all 
Christians everywhere should think about the sub- 
ject soberly, reverently, and with his fear before 
their eyes. Not only are we to study the subject, 
but we are to keep asking ourselves, How will it be 
possible for us to reduce the discord and hasten 
the day of beautiful and triumphant peace ? 

It is important in the discussion of so great a 
subject that we see clearly the end to be aimed at, 
and also the steps by which it may be attained. 
In the earlier stages of every discussion of a sub- 
ject of large dimensions, men become bewildered 
because they do not see clearly the goal toward 
which they ought to move. The air is filled with 
mists, and the best of men become blinded, so that 
they do not see distinctly what it is which is worth 
while striving for. This imperfect vision gives 
rise to numberless misapprehensions and misun- 
derstandings, and great reforms are often blocked 
and retarded simply because of the confusion that 
exists in the minds of those who are their ardent 
supporters. In our efforts to secure church unity, 
it is important that we should understand what 
unity is, and not allow it to become confounded 
with something which is not at all like it ; namely, 
uniformity. Uniformity is one thing and unity 
is quite another thing, but by many intelligent 
Christians they are conceived to be the same. 



CHRISTIAN UNITY 257 

When the average man thinks of a united church, 
he thinks of a uniform church, and this probably 
is not to be wondered at, because that has been the 
conception of Roman Catholicism for fifteen hun- 
dred years. When Roman Catholicism talks church 
unity, she always means church uniformity. Ac- 
cording to her conception, church unity lies in gov- 
ernment, and a united church is impossible unless 
all professing Christians render allegiance to one 
man. When Christianity found its way to the city 
of Rome, she was stamped with the genius of the 
Roman Caesars, and that impress she has borne to 
the present time. Rome had a genius for govern- 
ment. Her supreme ambition was to incorporate 
the nations and the races into her august and 
imperial system. To all surrounding people she 
gave laws, and the one thing upon which she in- 
sisted in every land was that the people should 
subject themselves to the Roman order. She 
wanted but one empire in the world, and there 
should be uniform laws from one end of it to the 
other. That idea was accepted by the leaders 
of the Roman Catholic church, and down to the 
present hour it is just as natural for the Roman 
priesthood to want to rule as it is for a bird to 
fly. The impulse runs in the blood. According 
to Roman Catholicism, there should be one vast 
hierarchy with officials rising rank above rank, 
culminating at last in one supreme head, the Vicar 
of Christ. Under this hierarchy, all the Lord's fol- 



258 CHRISTIAN UNITY 

lowers should bow in reverent obedience. That is 
a conception which thrills the imagination of thou- 
sands. It awes and subdues the Roman Catholics, 
and it also has a tremendous fascination for Protes- 
tants. There are thousands of Protestants whoi 
cannot escape the spell of it, and when they think 
of church unity, they also think of a church that 
shall be uniform throughout the world, a church 
that shall everywhere have the same form of wor- 
ship, the same polity, the same form of govern- 
ment, all of its parts being finely knit together and 
held in subjection to one supreme head. But how- 
ever beautiful that may be as an ideal, it evidently is 
not God's ideal. Roman Catholicism endeavored to 
make Europe uniform, but she failed. She held in 
her hands the wealth and the power of the world, 
and if uniformity were anything that could be se- 
cured, she would have secured it. She went to work 
upon Italy, and Italy obeyed ; she worked upon 
Spain, and Spain obeyed ; she went to work upon 
Holland, and Holland rebelled. The men who 
had picked their country from the bottom of the 
sea were not willing to be dictated to by the Bishop 
of Rome. Then took place one of the most hor- 
rible butcheries that has ever soaked our earth 
with blood, and in the end Rome retired, defeated. 
Rome tried to keep Germany uniform, and she 
failed. She tried to make England uniform, and 
failed. After the Pope had failed, English kings 
and queens tried to do it. Elizabeth tried, and so 



CHRISTIAN UNITY 259 

did James I, and so did Charles I, and Charles II, 
and James II, and they all failed. There was 
nothing but strife and confusion and hatred and 
suffering and imprisonment and blood and death, 
until finally with the coming of William and Mary 
the impracticable attempt was given up. There 
is something down deep in the blood of an Eng- 
lishman which renders it absolutely impossible for 
the scheme of uniformity to succeed. It would 
seem, then, that the unity which God wants is not 
the unity of uniformity. Uniformity is a thing of 
the skin ; unity is a thing of the heart. Uniformity 
is a thing that lies on the surface ; unity is a thing of 
the spirit. The unity for which the New Testa- 
ment pleads is a spiritual unity. It is not a unity 
of worship, or a unity of polity, or a unity of gov- 
ernment — all of which things are superficial and 
incidental. The unity for which the New Testa- 
ment pleads is a spiritual thing. " Giving dili- 
gence to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond 
of peace," cries the greatest of the apostles. And 
when Jesus in his great prayer prays for unity, it 
is always a unity that is spiritual. " I pray that 
they may be one in us." That is, in purpose, in 
desire, in aim, in disposition, in character, in love. 
We are then to get our idea of unity, not from 
the Church of Rome, but from the works of God. 
Science proclaims with a thousand tongues the 
unity of Nature. There is but one universe, and 
there is a divine harmony running through it. 



260 CHRISTIAN UNITY 

This is acknowledged by every one who is inter- 
ested in scientific studies, and yet how varied 
Nature is. You cannot sweep stars and blossoms, 
birds and pebbles, brooks and mountains, into a 
common category and compel them either to look 
alike or to act alike or to be alike — and yet Nature 
is profoundly, grandly one. It is the unity of di- 
versity which the Lord God Almighty tells us that 
he loves. And every time we lift up our eyes and 
look upon Nature, we are reminded that uniformity 
is not according to God's plan. Science tells us 
that the human race is one, and yet how different 
men are from one another. There are white men, 
black men, yellow men, red men, men of many 
sizes and many grades of culture, of many habits 
and many aspirations and ambitions, but never- 
theless, they are one. In human flesh, then, as well 
as in the world of Nature, God tells us that unity 
and uniformity are not the same. So far as we 
can see it will never come to pass that all the fol- 
lowers of the Lord will adopt the same form 
of worship and submit themselves to a common 
ecclesiastical head. Now if we grasp this larger 
idea of unity, we are better able to understand 
what is the sin of schism. According to the 
teaching of the Greek and Roman churches, and 
also of the Lutheran and Anglican churches, there 
is no sin so heinous and so damnable as the sin of 
schism ; no other sin works such mischief, no other 
sin is to be so dreaded and so hated, no other sin 



CHRISTIAN UNITY 26 1 

gives such pain to the head of the church as this. 
So Romanism and Lutheranism and Anglicanism 
have always taught. But what is schism ? Ac- 
cording to these four great churches, schism is a 
breach of church unity, and the breach of unity is 
made whenever one separates himself from the 
church authorities. A Roman Catholic says that 
every man is a schismatic who does not acknowl- 
edge allegiance to the Pope. Lutheranism says 
that every German is a schismatic that does not 
commune with the national church. Anglicanism 
says that every Englishman is a schismatic w T ho is 
not obedient to the English church. All the Wes- 
leyans and Congregationalists and Presbyterians 
and Baptists in England are to the authorities of 
the English church only so many schismatics and 
sectaries. But what is a schismatic ? According 
to the New Testament, he is a man who has not 
the Christlike disposition and separates himself 
from the church of God, the man who has not 
the loving heart. In all Roman Catholic countries, 
Roman Catholic priests and bishops treat with su- 
percilious contempt all ministers of other churches. 
In doing this these priests and bishops are schis- 
matics ; sectarianism has robbed them of a Chris- 
tian heart. We in this country cannot realize the 
lordly disdain, the snobbish air of condescension, 
with which many bishops and rectors of the Eng- 
lish church have always treated, and treat to-day, 
their Christian brethren outside the Anglican com- 



262 CHRISTIAN UNITY 

munion. But according to the New Testament, 
these bishops and rectors are the schismatics. 
One would not suppose they had ever seen the 
New Testament, so unbrotherly and so unchristian 
is their temper and their conduct. No man is a 
schismatic except a man who has cut himself off 
from Christ, and every man cuts himself off from 
Christ by fostering the disposition of an unloving 
heart. 

It is largely because of these misconceptions of 
what Christian unity really is that we have so 
many misdirected efforts aiming at church union. 
There is a feeling down deep in the hearts of many 
people that so long as there are different branches 
of the church, Christian unity is nothing but a 
dream, and that only by the reduction of the de- 
nominations can you ever fulfil the prayer of 
Christ. This feeling is especially strong in our 
day because of the confusion which fills Christen- 
dom. Thousands of men are frightened by the 
diversity of opinions. Men are thinking every- 
where, and thinking a thousand different things. 
You know how it is in regard to the Bible. Get 
together a hundred Christian people, and you can- 
not get them to think the same in regard to the 
Bible as a whole, or in regard to any one of the 
books, or in regard to any one sentence in any one 
of the books. And these divergences of opinion, 
already numerous, are going to become more and 
more in the immediate future. We are just at the 



CHRISTIAN UNITY 263 

beginning of the age of thought. And in this 
babel of opinion it is not surprising that many 
good men should feel that, after all, what we need 
is a strong government. We need somebody to 
restrain us, we need some external and august 
authority that shall tell us clearly what it is we are 
to believe. Then, again, the seamy side of denomi- 
nationalism has been much exploited, and the evils 
of the system have been set forth in such glowing 
language, that many Christians are almost ashamed 
to confess that they belong to any denomination 
at all. Men have told us a thousand times about 
the wicked extravagance of supporting three or 
four churches in a little village, and they have told 
us heartrending stories of the awful waste of 
precious money in all the towns and cities of the 
West, a half a dozen different denominations build- 
ing churches side by side, when a single church 
would have done the work. They have also re- 
minded us of the unseemly rivalries, of the enmities 
and jealousies which are created by these denomi- 
nations working side by side, and some of us after 
listening have leaped to the conclusion that after 
all it would be a great deal better if there were 
only a single church. But the New Testament says 
that we are to judge a tree by its fruits. You who 
think that a single communion would be so much 
superior to several communions ought to study 
Christian history and see how the single church 
theory has worked. They had but one church in 



264 CHRISTIAN UNITY 

Italy, and Italy is largely a land of infidels. They 
have had but one church in Russia, and that church 
is dead. They have had but one church in Germany, 
and the great mass of the German people do not care 
enough for it to attend its worship. They had but 
one church in France, and more than half of the 
French people are unbelievers. They had but one 
church in Spain, and Spain is a skeleton among 
the nations. I do not deny that denominationalism 
has its seamy side, and that many of its by-products 
are far from pleasing, but that is the price we pay, 
and we ought to bear in mind that by our many 
churches we ward off dangers that have cursed 
and snapped the spiritual strength of other lands. 
For my part, give me the New England village with 
its three or four churches standing side by side, 
looking out upon the green, in preference to 
any Italian village with its single church, or any 
Russian village with its single church, or any 
German village with its single church. I do not 
say that we need as many as one hundred and forty 
different denominations. I have no doubt the num- 
ber will be considerably reduced. I do not say 
that many of the evils will not be lessened by 
schemes of federation and by a larger development 
of the principles of Christian comity ; I only protest 
against the assumption that denominationalism is 
an invention of the devil, when church history 
clearly demonstrates it to every man that is willing 
to face the facts that it is the most efficient, most 



CHRISTIAN UNITY 265 

fruitful, most life-giving scheme of church govern- 
ment which has ever been tried. Let us then be care- 
ful when men come to us with their schemes of diplo- 
macy, urging us to weld two or three or more 
denominations together. Sometimes this can be 
done, and sometimes it should not be done. Let us 
beware of the plausible talk which makes external 
authority seem necessary and beautiful; for the 
suppression of differences either in doctrine or in 
worship is not the best or the quickest route to 
Christian unity. The history of the church proves 
that many an external union covers over dissensions 
that become all the fiercer because they are covered. 
When we are urged to give up this and that in order 
to unite with somebody else who is also willing to 
give up that and this, let us ponder before we take 
the step, asking ourselves if both sides may possibly 
not give up too much. The men, therefore, who 
shout the loudest and the longest for church unity 
are not always the men who are doing the most to 
promote it. How shall we advance the noble 
cause? Obey the Pope — so says Romanism. 
Use the Prayer Book, says Anglicanism. Reduce 
the number of our denominations, shouts the 
modern enthusiastic reformer. But if we read the 
New Testament aright, he does the most to ad- 
vance the cause of Christian unity who works the 
hardest to build up in human hearts a Christian 
temper, to develop in men and women everywhere 
broader sympathies and a more generous apprecia- 



266 CHRISTIAN- UNITY 

tion. He is working most effectively for Christian 
unity who places Christ the highest, and brings 
men nearest to him. 

I have said that there could be but one Christian 
church upon the earth, and I like to believe that 
there has never been in all the 1900 years more than 
one church. There have always been differences, 
but the differences are not deep or fatal. There are 
still great differences, but most of them do not hurt. 
Listen to a Grecian priest in St. Petersburg, and a 
Roman priest in Rome, and a Lutheran preacher 
in Berlin, and a French priest in Paris, and an 
Anglican bishop in London, and any Protestant 
minister in New York City, and after listening to 
their sermons you would know that all of them were 
Christian men. Differ they would in language and 
likewise in emphasis and accent, but there would be 
something about each and every sermon which 
would tell you that they had a common Master. 
There are no Christians on the earth that do not 
say : " Our Father who art in heaven." All 
Christians everywhere say that the Golden Rule 
is golden, and that the New Commandment is 
the highest commandment ever given unto men. 
Christians are divided into many folds, even as 
it is the divine will that they should be ; they 
are grouped into divers communions, but this cer- 
tainly is the Lord's will. It does an Episcopalian 
church good to have a Methodist church not far 
away, and it helps a Methodist church to have an 



CHRISTIAN UNITY 267 

Episcopalian church in the same town. Every 
Catholic priest is helped if he has round him a 
circle of Protestant preachers, and every city is 
all the better if it has in it the great Roman Catho- 
lic church with its emphasis upon obedience and 
reverence and loyalty to the traditions of the past. 
Let us then cultivate kindly, generous, sympathetic 
feelings toward all the followers of the Lord. I 
know people who never refer to the Baptists except 
to bring in something concerning water, as though 
the great Baptist Communion had never done any- 
thing for the world but dip men and women under 
water. There are Christians who never refer to 
the Methodists without some sarcastic fling about 
their shouting, as though the great Methodist 
church had never done anything in this land of 
ours but shout. There are those who never speak 
of the Episcopalians without a sneer at their for- 
mality, as though formality were the only product 
that Episcopalianism has as yet brought forth. All 
the great communions of the church of God have 
labored and sacrificed and wrought victories and 
added to the imperishable spiritual wealth of the 
world. All honor to them all, and love for them 
all, and let us thank God that it is true to-day, as it 
has been true from the beginning, and as it will be 
true to the end, that there is but one body and one 
spirit, and one hope, one Lord, one faith, and one 
baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all 
and through all and in all. 



XIII 
INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 



Preached on April 14, 1907, in the Broadway Tabernacle, 
New York, the Sunday preceding the National Peace Con- 
gress in New York. 



270 



XIII 
"INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 

" Blessed are the peacemakers : for they shall be called the 
sons of God.' 1 — Matt. v. 9. 

To us the words sound as sweet as the chime of 
silver bells, but to the people of 1900 years ago 
they were as wild and discordant as the blare of a 
horn blown by an idiot. They made mockery of 
the most sacred traditions of the past and contra- 
dicted the common sense of the world. " Blessed 
are the war makers, for they shall be called the 
sons of God." Assyria had written this with her 
sword, and Babylonia had written it, and Persia 
had written it, and long before these Egypt had 
written it, and in later times Greece had written it, 
and Rome was writing it in letters of blood over 
the lands and the seas. And who is this that dares 
stand up and say : " Blessed are the peacemakers : 
for they shall be called the sons of God"? 
Who is this young man from Galilee, with the 
smell of the carpenter shop on his garments, who 
dares to trample upon the traditions of the 
past and insult the common sense of the race ? 
" Blessed are the peacemakers : for they shall be 

271 



272 "INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 

called the sons of God." The words traveled out 
from Palestine to the ends of the world, rolling 
down through lines of marble statues of the great 
military chieftains who had filled the world with 
their glory, every marble brow bearing a wreath 
placed there by a jubilant and adoring people. 
Before the marble images crowds stood awestruck 
as in the presence of the mightiest, but the words 
of the Galilean carpenter have withered the 
wreaths and scattered the crowds. It has become 
the commonplace of our time : " Blessed are the 
peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of 
God." 

We are always in danger of forgetting how 
radical Christianity is. It is the most radical reli- 
gion ever preached on this earth. Whenever it is 
rightly understood, it turns things upside down. 
Its great sentences are to us commonplaces — we 
can handle them without a thrill, listen to them 
and grow drowsy. That is because they have 
been worn smooth by the breath of sixty genera- 
tions. But if we could really understand them, if 
we paid attention to them, we should see down in 
the depths of them the red glare of volcanic fires. 
Whenever men truly grasp them, they work renais- 
sances, reforms, and revolutions. The followers of 
Jesus ought to be the most radical people on the 
earth. They always are when they are baptized 
with the spirit of the Lord. Take, for instance, such 
a commonplace idea as the Fatherhood of God. 



"INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 273 

What a radical doctrine it is ! Can you conceive of 
anything so quixotic and visionary as setting a whole 
world to praying, " Our Father " ! There is only 
one doctrine more incredible than that, and that is 
the Brotherhood of Man. How preposterous it all 
is when one stops to think about it : that all the men 
on the face of the earth are members of one family, 
that they belong to one another, and owe fraternal 
obligations to one another ! Yet these are the two 
fundamental doctrines of Jesus. If men could 
only comprehend them, old things would pass away, 
and all things would become new. But it was not 
because the ideas of Jesus were radical that men 
were disturbed and exasperated by them; it was 
because he carried his radicalism into action. He 
could have taught the brotherhood of man without 
molestation. It is a beautiful and poetic doctrine ; 
men would have applauded it if he had only taught 
it. But he lived it. He was brotherly with pub- 
licans, men that were not respectable. That en- 
raged the people. " He is the friend of publicans " 
— so they sneered all over Palestine. He might 
have said nice things about the publicans, thrown 
them beautiful gems of thought — but to sit down 
with them and eat with them in defiance of the 
traditions of polite society ! What man has a right 
to trample on the established beliefs of the best 
people of his day ? Jesus was so radical that he 
dared to live the doctrine of the brotherhood of 
man. He was brotherly even with Samaritans. 



274 "INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 

He reached his hand across a bottomless chasm and 
touched the foul flesh of a Samaritan who was a 
leper. It stung every respectable Jew to madness. 
The Pharisees belched forth their venom in the 
words : " You are a Samaritan and have a devil." 
In the estimation of every pious Jew, only a devil was 
capable of being brotherly to a Samaritan. Jesus 
was the preacher of righteousness — and righteous- 
ness is a thrilling doctrine, and men like to hear 
it preached. If eloquently spoken, they will 
applaud it. But Jesus wrought righteousness, 
established it here and now. For instance, he 
went into the temple, upset the tables of the 
money-changers with his own hands, and with his 
own strong right arm drove the beasts and the 
scoundrels out. It was not what he preached, 
but what he did, that made men wild to drink his 
blood. From the day on which he overturned the 
tables and sent the coins rolling across the marble 
floor, many a hand in Jerusalem itched to take him 
by the throat and crush out his life. You cannot 
understand that Satanic chorus of voices : " Crucify 
him ! Crucify him ! " unless you understand that 
Jesus was the most radical man that ever lived. 

And the terrible thing about it all is that he in- 
sists upon it that his followers shall be like him. 
He never grew weary of emphasizing that one point. 
His followers are to do what he does, they are to 
drink the cup of which he drank, they are to 
be baptized with the baptism with which he 



"INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 2?$ 

was baptized, they are to take up their cross and 
follow him ~ that, he says, is fundamental. He 
never allows them to get away from it. He that 
hears these sayings of mine and does them is like 
a man who builds on rock; he that hears my 
sayings and does not do them is like a great fool. 
That was his teaching at the beginning, and that 
was his teaching at the end. In the upper cham- 
ber on the night of his betrayal the exhortation 
runs after this same fashion. " If ye know these 
things, happy are ye if ye do them." " Ye are my 
friends if ye do whatsoever I command you." In 
other words, Christians are called to be brothers 
to all men everywhere, to manifest the fraternal 
spirit toward all men of every race. They are to go 
through the world overturning the tables, making 
clean the places that are foul, and driving wicked 
men to their hiding-places. They are to turn the 
world upside down and consent to crucifixion. 

That is the Christian religion in a nutshell. We 
are prepared, therefore, for just such a beatitude 
as this : " Blessed are the peacemakers." You 
will observe that he has nothing to say about the 
peace wishers, the peace hopers, the peace lovers, 
the peace eulogizers, the peace sentimentalists — 
the blessing is promised simply to those who make 
peace, who work for it, who promote it, who by 
sacrifice and effort establish it in human hearts and 
political institutions. Peace is not a gift, it is an 
achievement. It is not something to be sung about, 



276 "INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 

but something to be wrought out by the sweat and 
the prowess and the indefatigable labor of man. 
It is possible to make mischief in this world. Some 
men like to make it ; they have made it ; they are 
making it now. It is possible to make hate and 
fan the flames of enmity, to increase the volume 
of the notes of discord. Many men like to do 
that — they are doing it to-day. In a world so full 
of passion, prejudice, and hate as this one is, it is 
not difficult to make strife and dissension and war. 
Christianity calls upon men to make peace, to an- 
tagonize the forces that make for discord, to say 
by their lips and their lives that the ideals of 
Jesus can be wrought out in human civilization. 

Blessed are the peacemakers, the men who strug- 
gle and labor and suffer and sacrifice for peace, 
for they shall be called the sons of God. Not now 
are they so called, but they shall be. We are liv- 
ing in a world round which the clouds hang heavy. 
The mist is still in men's eyes, and most of us see 
but dimly. Through the mists we can see the 
glow of military pomp and catch the flash of mili- 
tary glory, feel the splendor of military achieve- 
ment, stand bewitched before the genius of mili- 
tary prowess — but the clouds will some day blow 
away, the mists will some time melt into air, and 
the red battle-fields covered with writhing men will 
not be counted fields of glory, and the military 
chieftains, instead of standing in the highest places, 
will be found in the lowest ranks of the servants 



"INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 277 

of humanity, while far above them will sit in quiet 
dignity the broad-browed sons of God, who in their 
day and generation labored to extend the limits of 
the kingdom of good-will. 

Let us think, then, about the subject of inter- 
national peace. It is the greatest of all subjects 
upon which the human mind in our day can dwell. 
What other subject is so broad as this ? It touches 
all the nations ; it involves all the races. There is 
not a being on the earth that is not covered by this 
vast theme. It is a problem of human interest ; it 
is a religious question, but it is also a political 
question. It is a question with which the state 
must deal; it is also a question with which the 
church must deal. It is an ethical question ; it is 
also a spiritual question. No matter who a man 
is, or what he believes, if he is human, he must be 
interested in this theme. It is a question which 
will not be settled to-day or to-morrow ; it is too 
vast and complicated for that. Centuries have 
labored together to create it, and centuries must 
work together to solve it. A man who comes to 
the subject of international peace comes to a sub- 
ject which will not only enlarge his heart, but tax 
and discipline his mind. 

The world has gotten itself into a most curious 
dilemma. All the great nations to-day are lovers 
of peace, yet all of them are constantly preparing 
for war. No absurder spectacle is to be found in 
the history of the world. Europe, for instance, is 



278 "INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 

staggering under the weight of thirty billion 
dollars of debt, most of it caused by wars or prepa- 
rations for wars ; and in addition to the enormous 
sums which must be raised to pay the interest on 
this debt, Europe is spending one and a half billions 
of dollars every year for the maintenance of her 
armies and navies. And, strange to say, the sum 
although colossal grows larger and larger year by 
year. The annual sum expended is four hundred 
million dollars larger now than it was eight years ago. 
All the leading nations are pushing onward in this 
direction, with the United States at the head of the 
column. Within the last ten years our population 
has increased about 10 per cent and our military 
expenditures 300 per cent. In two respects we lead 
the world : in the number of murders and the pro- 
portionate increase of our military expenditures. 

The result of this is that great reformatory 
movements must suffer for lack of money. The civil- 
ization of the world is checked by this awful finan- 
cial drain. England spends over three hundred mil- 
lions a year on her army and navy, and only eighty 
millions on education and science and art. After 
paying for her soldiers, and sailors, there is not 
much money left for anything else. Russia spends 
over two hundred millions a year for her army and 
navy, and only twenty two millions on public in- 
struction. After the god of war has gotten his 
share, there is very little left for better things. 
Even in the United States in a time of profound 



"INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 279 

peace, without an enemy in the world, we are 
spending over two hundred million dollars a year 
for our army and navy, and although we are one 
of the richest nations on earth, Congress finds it 
difficult to raise money to buy a lot for a new post- 
office, and is all the time haggling over the wages 
which shall be paid to the men who carry our 
letters. But this is not the only result : not only 
is the way of reform barred and the progress of 
civilization arrested, but the hearts of men are be- 
coming embittered everywhere. Men are becom- 
ing anarchists, nihilists, terrorists, revolutionists, 
socialists, and in every country there is the grim 
muttering of a coming storm. See the poverty in 
all the countries, listen to the cry of distress that 
goes up constantly to heaven, and then see the 
rulers of the world using ever increasing amounts 
of money for multiplying the instruments of 
slaughter, and you will cry out : " O judgment, 
thou hast fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost 
their reason." 

It is at a crisis like this that the Christian church 
finds her opportunity. She is the church of the 
Prince of Peace. That is his proudest title. She 
is the promulgator of the doctrine of human 
brotherhood. The prayer which Christians must 
all repeat begins with, " Our Father " ! Other 
men may indulge in national animosities ; Chris- 
tians cannot. Other men may give way to race 
prejudice ; Christians must not. Other men may 



280 "INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 

foment strife and fan the flames of passion ; Chris- 
tians must always work for peace. To that end 
we were born, and for that purpose came we into 
the world. The baptismal water on our foreheads 
meant that we were to work for human brother- 
hood. To doubt that is disloyalty, and to evade it 
is a sin. Because the church stands for brother- 
hood, it is bound to consider the needs of the poor. 
The Christian church at the very beginning turned 
itself enthusiastically to the needs of the poor. 
The first cry that arrested its ears was the cry of 
poverty; the first money that was ever collected 
was money which was sent to the poor ; the first 
officers elected in the church were chosen to look 
after the poor. When Paul came up to Jerusalem 
to confer with the three elders of the Palestinian 
church, they reminded him how essential it was 
that he should remember the poor, and he told 
them that that was the very thing he was zealous 
to do. What an opportunity, then, the church of 
Christ has in our day when the poverty of the 
world is crying trumpet-tongued for relief, to com- 
pel men to think about the wickedness of squan- 
dering treasure on the multiplication of instruments 
of destruction. 

But somebody asks : What can the church do ? 
It can do much. Preachers can discuss the ques- 
tion ; they can bring the thought of men to bear 
upon it. A distinguished judge of the Supreme 
Court of the United States in an article in a recent 



"INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 28 1 

magazine, in contrasting the professions, said in 
substance this : " The doctor deals with men's 
bodies, the lawyer deals with their material inter- 
ests, but the preacher deals with the life to come." 
The distinguished judge is a friend of ministers, 
and he was endeavoring to say something which 
would give the minister distinction — but, alas, what 
an antiquated sound his language has ! That is 
the idea which men had a hundred years ago. I 
do not know of any preacher who has it now. 

Preachers to-day are not dealing with the life to 
come except indirectly ; they are dealing with the 
life that now is. The books which they read are 
books which deal with the life of to-day ; the prob- 
lems about which they think are the problems 
which vex society now. Every preacher who 
understands his business knows that he is not 
called to deal with the life to come ; it is with the 
life of this world that he is to grapple. It is with 
the age in which he lives that he is to deal. He 
is as near to men as either the doctor or the law- 
yer. It is his business to turn human minds and 
hearts to the problems and evils at our door. It 
is only recently that we have come to understand 
the Lord's Prayer : " Thy kingdom come, thy will 
be done on earth even as it is done in heaven." 
No preacher nowadays is trying to get his people 
into some other world ; he is trying to get the 
better world established in this world. It is not 
to prepare men to do God's will somewhere else, 



282 "INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 

but to train them to do God's will here and now, 
that every preacher lives and prays and labors, 
and therefore international peace is a question 
with which a preacher has to deal. He must 
bring it often to the minds of men and compel 
them to think about it. So long as we pray that 
the kingdom of God may come, we are bound to 
consider the wisdom of spending so much money 
on battleships and guns. But what can laymen 
do ? First of all, they can inform themselves. It 
is surprising the lamentable lack of information 
among intelligent people upon this all-important 
subject. There are thousands of Christians who 
have no conception of the enormous sums of money 
which are being squandered, and of the wicked 
and inexcusable folly into which Christendom has 
been led. 

If all the Christians of this country would read 
the last volume of Bloch's masterly work on 
War, and also a half-dozen other volumes which 
have appeared within the last five years, enthusi- 
asm would burn like a conflagration, and there 
would be protests which would be heard all over 
the world. If Christians were better informed 
than they are, they would speak with greater 
courage, and likewise with fuller wisdom. Ours 
is the land of public opinion, and every one of us 
has our part to do in forming it. It is not our 
congressman after all who form our laws ; it is 
that mysterious, intangible, mighty public opinion 



"INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 283 

created by the minds and hearts of numberless 
people. Now the public opinion of any nation 
can be changed : it can be debased, it can be 
elevated; it can be paganized, it can be Chris- 
tianized. 

Many of you have, no doubt, been surprised 
at the changed attitude in the French republic, 
not only toward England, but also toward Germany, 
within the last few years. Who would have be- 
lieved that France and England could ever have 
come so close together as they are to-day ? and 
who could have believed that within a generation 
after the Franco-Prussian War so many French- 
men could say such generous things about their 
German neighbors ? What has wrought this change ? 
It has been brought about by the systematic and 
deliberate and persistent efforts of a noble band 
of Frenchmen who are working for the day of 
universal peace. By their speeches and by their 
writings these men have changed to an amazing 
degree the temper of the French republic. What 
has been done in France can be done anywhere. 

The thirty million Christians in the United States 
can make the sentiment of this country what they 
choose. There is need for just such an in- 
fluence as the Christian church can bring to bear. 
We are a prosperous and, to a large extent, a vain- 
glorious people. We have been deeply material- 
ized by our material successes. There is a coarse 
and brutal strain in us as a nation, and this strain 



284 "INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 

manifests itself ever and anon. The worst manifes- 
tation of it in recent days is that which is displayed 
in the Program of the Jamestown Exposition. 
The promoters of that enterprise in making up 
their Program put down thirty attractive features, 
eighteen of which are military or naval. In read- 
ing down the list, with its high-flown adjectives 
and its constant repetition of " military glory " and 
"military splendor," one can hardly realize that 
such a thing could have come to pass in a land 
like ours. " Come, O people, come," these James- 
town Exposition managers shout; "come to see 
the uniforms of soldiers,2see the battleships, see 
the torpedo boats, see the military parades, 
see the military balloons, see the military relics, 
see all the pomp and glory of war." O that it 
should have come to this in the land of Washing- 
ton, who prayed constantly that God might remove 
the awful scourge of war from the earth ! That 
it should come to this in the land of Grant, whose 
greatest saying is chiseled in the granite of his 
tomb : " Let us have peace " ! That it should 
come to this in the land of Sherman, who said : 
" I am tired and sick of war. War is hell " ! That 
it should come to this in the land of benefactors 
and philanthropists, all of whom, from Benjamin 
Franklin down, have been advocates of peace and 
antagonists of war ! That it should come to this 
in the land whose greatest poets have sung their 
sweetest songs concerning peace, and whose people 



"INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 285 

have ever delighted from the first day until now, 
not in the barracks or the parade ground, but in 
the church and in the school ! When we have 
still among us men capable of writing the James- 
town Program, there is a deal of work for the 
Christian church to do. 

If the Christian church does not do this work, 
then somebody else will do it. We are living in 
God's universe, and the stars in their courses are 
fighting against war. It is lamentable the way the 
Christian church has fumbled almost every impor- 
tant subject. It is amazing that at nearly every 
crisis she should have been weighed in the bal- 
ances and found wanting. Everybody nowadays 
sees that slavery was an iniquitous institution, that 
it is not right for one man to own another. Is it 
not amazing that all Christians could not see that 
fifty years ago ? Thousands could not. They were 
wise men and good men, and yet for some reason 
their eyes were blinded so they could not see, their 
hearts were hardened so they could not feel. Here 
and there there was a minister like Henry Ward 
Beecher in Brooklyn and Joseph P. Thompson 
in New York who saw the truth and spoke out 
bravely, but hundreds of ministers were dumb. 
Here and there were noble laymen, and noble 
women whose hearts went out in sympathy with 
the slave, and who worked and prayed for the 
great redemption, but the masses of Christians 
were indifferent. 



286 "INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 

In the year 1855 David Christie brought out 
his famous book, " Cotton is King." He had noth- 
ing but sneers for the abolitionist — abolition, he 
said, was a vagary, a sentimental dream. His ar- 
gument was incontrovertible. It ran thus : The 
North needs cotton, the South must produce it; 
the South can produce it only by slave labor — 
therefore the negro will remain a slave. Millions 
of men assented to the argument of Christie. They 
did not know that long before Christie wrote his 
book, a young man by the name of Lincoln had 
been down in New Orleans where he had seen a 
mulatto young woman of pretty face and comely 
body put up for sale at auction. Lincoln had 
looked into the auctioneer's face and heard him 
say: "Come up, gentlemen, and examine her; I 
keep back no secrets from my customers," — and 
the heart of the young man from the North grew hot 
within him. He said : " By God, if I ever get the 
chance to hit that thing, I will hit it hard." God 
in his own good time gave him the chance — and 
he hit it hard. And whenever I pick up a paper 
and see that the United States government has 
spent ten million dollars for a new battleship — 
as much money as would buy all the land of Har- 
vard University and all its more than a hundred 
buildings ; and all the land of Hampton Institute 
and all its farms and buildings ; and all the land 
of Tuskegee and all of its buildings, too — when 
I read of that much money being put into a single 



"INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 287 

vessel weighted down with instruments of slaughter, 
I console myself by saying : There is a young man 
somewhere under our flag who will in God's good 
time hit that thing, and hit it hard. We cannot 
go on as we are going. 

Already we read that England has invested 
670 millions of dollars in her navy and she 
is spending over 300 millions of dollars on army 
and navy each year ; and while she is doing this, 
thousands of men and women in London are pick- 
ing up apple-cores on the street and eating them 
because they are so hungry, picking up peach 
seeds and cracking them for the kernel in them to 
save them from starvation, and thousands of little 
boys and girls are eating crusts out of swill cans 
in order to keep themselves alive. Do you sup- 
pose that England can go on doing that forever ? 
I tell you, No. And do you suppose the United 
States can go on investing in battleships at ten 
million dollars apiece when over two millions of 
her people cannot read or write, and when nine 
millions of black men and women in the South, 
vicious and ignorant, many of them, are crying for 
relief ? and when all of our American cities are 
filling up with a foreign population which, because 
of its character, is multiplying our dangers and 
making more complicated all of our problems ? 
Do you suppose our republic can go on building 
battleships when we need our treasure in so many 
other fields ? I tell you, No. Do you suppose 



288 "INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 

that Russia can go on doing what she is doing 
to-day, voting new money for battleships, while 
millions of her people are on the verge of starva- 
tion ? Who can see the pictures of the haggard 
women and the pinched faces of the little chil- 
dren — who can see even the pictures of the poor 
starved horses without being kept awake at night by 
the awful spectacle ? And if the church of Jesus 
Christ on earth allows that outrage to go on with- 
out a protest, then the church will cease to be the 
church of Christ, and deserves the scorn and ridi- 
cule of men. There are times when, if the church 
does not speak, the very stones will cry out against 
her. 

But dark as the picture is, there is abundant 
room for hope. Things are bad, but they are not 
so bad as they have been, and they are certain 
to become better. The nations are coming closer 
together. Steam is at work and so is electricity, 
and they are strong-limbed servants of the Al- 
mighty. The scholars of the world have long 
since come together, and their international meet- 
ings are increasing year by year. The writers of 
the world have come together ; the same books are 
read around the world. We already have many 
international bodies, and we are destined to have 
many more. We have an International Postal 
Union ; an International Institute of Agriculture 
made up of forty-two of the leading nations of 
the earth ; we have an International Parliamentary 



"INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 289 

Union made up of twenty-five hundred statesmen 
of the leading nations of the world; we have a 
body of International Law made up of several 
hundred of the leading jurists of the world ; and 
by and by we shall have an International Commer- 
cial Bureau ; and sometime we are going to have 
an International Congress which will give advisory 
legislation to all the empires and republics of the 
world. It may be that this is the next step which, 
under God, the world is destined to take. It has 
been a dream of the prophets and poets for centu- 
ries that there would sometime be a Parliament in 
which the nations should all be represented. It is 
not unlikely that it is through just such a Parlia- 
ment that the problem of disarmament will be 
solved. 

For many years the subject of arbitration had 
been discussed, and many an effort had been 
put forth to induce nations to adopt arbitration 
treaties, but for the most part these efforts were in 
vain. But at the close of the last century the 
Hague Court was established, and within these last 
seven years over two score arbitration treaties 
have been signed. The establishment of the court 
made it easy for the cause of arbitration to ad- 
vance. There has been a deal of talk against the 
consummate folly and wickedness of armaments, 
but the talk has thus far brought forth no tangible 
results. It may be that disarmament will never 
come until we have the International Congress — 



290 "INTERNATIONAL PEACE" 

and for this Congress the leaders of the Peace 
movement are enthusiastically at work. The con- 
gress to be held this week in our city has a double 
purpose : First, the creation of a public sentiment 
in favor of international arbitration ; and secondly, 
the creation of influences which may be brought 
to bear upon our statesmen which shall lead them 
to favor the creation of an international legislative 
body composed of the representatives of the na- 
tions of the world. 

America should certainly take the lead in all 
this work for peace. We owe it to our past 
and to our present and to our future. Be- 
cause of our position we ought to do it, because 
of our size and also because of our wealth we 
ought to do it, because of our history and because 
of the great men whose names have made our 
nation illustrious we ought to do it, because we 
are a republic built on the principles of equality 
and fraternity and good-will ; because God has 
given unto us such a land, and because he has 
dowered us with so many gifts, and because he 
has filled full a wonderful century, we ought, 
through our chosen rulers, to work in season and out 
of season for the creation of the parliament of man, 
the federation of the world. 



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